In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”
\nThe history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.
"]],["elementText",{"elementTextId":"3571"},["text","\n\n\"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to.\"
\n
– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.
Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.
It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. 1-Space-A0
\n1-Space-PS4The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in the late 1970s. And then, later, a National Institute of Immunology and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. 1-Space-A1
\nIn the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.
\n1-Space-V1Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. 1-Space-A3 (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. 1-Space-A2
\n1-Space-P1The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).
\n1-Space-PS2Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.
The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. 1-Space-A4
\n1-Space-PS1For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.
\n\n
The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.
But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.
However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. 1-India-A8
\r\n1-India-V1
Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on \"Biological Sciences in India\".
The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.
\r\n1-India-PS2At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching \"evidence-based conservation\" in 2003.
\r\n
Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala 1-India-A7, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world 1-India-A6, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. 1-India-A5
Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.
Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.
\n
This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. 1-Recognition-A12 To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. 1-Recognition-A9
Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)
In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.
\n1-Recognition-PS2Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.
\n1-Recognition-P1Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”
\n1-Recognition-V1In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. 1-Recognition-A10 And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. 1-Recognition-A11
\n
More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.
But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. 1-Reflection-A15
One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. 1-Reflection-A16
Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science 1-Reflection-A13, finding research questions 1-Reflection-A14 and the bridge between biology and society respectively. 1-Reflection-A17
\r\n1-Reflection-PS1These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.
\r\n
One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”
In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”
\nThe history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.
"]],["elementText",{"elementTextId":"3571"},["text","\n\n\"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to.\"
\n
– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.
Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.
It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. 1-Space-A0
\n1-Space-PS4The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in the late 1970s. And then, later, a National Institute of Immunology and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. 1-Space-A1
\nIn the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.
\n1-Space-V1Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. 1-Space-A3 (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. 1-Space-A2
\n1-Space-P1The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).
\n1-Space-PS2Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.
The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. 1-Space-A4
\n1-Space-PS1For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.
\n\n
The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.
But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.
However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. 1-India-A8
\r\n1-India-V1
Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on \"Biological Sciences in India\".
The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.
\r\n1-India-PS2At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching \"evidence-based conservation\" in 2003.
\r\n
Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala 1-India-A7, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world 1-India-A6, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. 1-India-A5
Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.
Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.
\n
This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. 1-Recognition-A12 To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. 1-Recognition-A9
Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)
In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.
\n1-Recognition-PS2Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.
\n1-Recognition-P1Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”
\n1-Recognition-V1In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. 1-Recognition-A10 And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. 1-Recognition-A11
\n
More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.
But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. 1-Reflection-A15
One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. 1-Reflection-A16
Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science 1-Reflection-A13, finding research questions 1-Reflection-A14 and the bridge between biology and society respectively. 1-Reflection-A17
\r\n1-Reflection-PS1These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.
\r\n
One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”
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.
\n
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.
\r\n
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.
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
\r\n
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
\r\n
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
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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.
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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 bistable behaviour, 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
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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 letter 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
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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.
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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: protein(s). 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 “Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”, 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”.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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
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
In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”
\nThe history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.
"]],["elementText",{"elementTextId":"3571"},["text","\n\n\"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to.\"
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– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.
Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.
It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. 1-Space-A0
\n1-Space-PS4The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in the late 1970s. And then, later, a National Institute of Immunology and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. 1-Space-A1
\nIn the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.
\n1-Space-V1Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. 1-Space-A3 (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. 1-Space-A2
\n1-Space-P1The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).
\n1-Space-PS2Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.
The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. 1-Space-A4
\n1-Space-PS1For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.
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The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.
But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.
However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. 1-India-A8
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Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on \"Biological Sciences in India\".
The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.
\r\n1-India-PS2At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching \"evidence-based conservation\" in 2003.
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Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala 1-India-A7, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world 1-India-A6, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. 1-India-A5
Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.
Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.
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This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. 1-Recognition-A12 To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. 1-Recognition-A9
Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)
In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.
\n1-Recognition-PS2Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.
\n1-Recognition-P1Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”
\n1-Recognition-V1In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. 1-Recognition-A10 And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. 1-Recognition-A11
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More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.
But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. 1-Reflection-A15
One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. 1-Reflection-A16
Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science 1-Reflection-A13, finding research questions 1-Reflection-A14 and the bridge between biology and society respectively. 1-Reflection-A17
\r\n1-Reflection-PS1These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.
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One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”
Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.
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At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.
When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. 3-Hiring-A4
It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. 3-Hiring-A5
One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.
NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.
Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.
The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. 3-Hiring-A1 And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. 3-Hiring-A2
The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. 3-Hiring-A3
The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.
Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.
K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). 3-Startup-A3
One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.
Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.
Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. 3-Startup-A2 Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.
Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, “extreme optimism and mild jugaad”.
More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.
MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.
The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. 3-Collab-A1
Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.
The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.
Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. 3-Collab-A3
For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was \"a great deal of collaboration and cooperation\" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4
When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.
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The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?
Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5
The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.
It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. 3-Students-A3
When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. 3-Students-A2 (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).
Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.
NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. 3-Students-A4
Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. 3-Students-A1
SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.
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One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone.
It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.
Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4
Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.
Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. 3-Scaling-A2 And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. 3-Scaling-A3
Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. 3-Scaling-A1
Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”
NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.
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In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”
\nThe history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.
"]],["elementText",{"elementTextId":"3571"},["text","\n\n\"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to.\"
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– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.
Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.
It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. 1-Space-A0
\n1-Space-PS4The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in the late 1970s. And then, later, a National Institute of Immunology and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. 1-Space-A1
\nIn the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.
\n1-Space-V1Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. 1-Space-A3 (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. 1-Space-A2
\n1-Space-P1The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).
\n1-Space-PS2Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.
The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. 1-Space-A4
\n1-Space-PS1For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.
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The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.
But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.
However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. 1-India-A8
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Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on \"Biological Sciences in India\".
The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.
\r\n1-India-PS2At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching \"evidence-based conservation\" in 2003.
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Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala 1-India-A7, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world 1-India-A6, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. 1-India-A5
Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.
Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.
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This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. 1-Recognition-A12 To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. 1-Recognition-A9
Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)
In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.
\n1-Recognition-PS2Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.
\n1-Recognition-P1Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”
\n1-Recognition-V1In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. 1-Recognition-A10 And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. 1-Recognition-A11
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More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.
But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. 1-Reflection-A15
One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. 1-Reflection-A16
Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science 1-Reflection-A13, finding research questions 1-Reflection-A14 and the bridge between biology and society respectively. 1-Reflection-A17
\r\n1-Reflection-PS1These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.
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One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”
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.
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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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.”
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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
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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
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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.
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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 bistable behaviour, 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
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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 letter 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
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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.
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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: protein(s). 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 “Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”, 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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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.
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
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
In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”
\nThe history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.
"]],["elementText",{"elementTextId":"3571"},["text","\n\n\"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to.\"
\n
– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.
Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.
It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. 1-Space-A0
\n1-Space-PS4The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in the late 1970s. And then, later, a National Institute of Immunology and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. 1-Space-A1
\nIn the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.
\n1-Space-V1Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. 1-Space-A3 (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. 1-Space-A2
\n1-Space-P1The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).
\n1-Space-PS2Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.
The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. 1-Space-A4
\n1-Space-PS1For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.
\n\n
The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.
But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.
However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. 1-India-A8
\r\n1-India-V1
Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on \"Biological Sciences in India\".
The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.
\r\n1-India-PS2At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching \"evidence-based conservation\" in 2003.
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Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala 1-India-A7, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world 1-India-A6, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. 1-India-A5
Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.
Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.
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This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. 1-Recognition-A12 To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. 1-Recognition-A9
Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)
In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.
\n1-Recognition-PS2Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.
\n1-Recognition-P1Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”
\n1-Recognition-V1In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. 1-Recognition-A10 And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. 1-Recognition-A11
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More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.
But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. 1-Reflection-A15
One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. 1-Reflection-A16
Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science 1-Reflection-A13, finding research questions 1-Reflection-A14 and the bridge between biology and society respectively. 1-Reflection-A17
\r\n1-Reflection-PS1These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.
\r\n
One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”
In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”
\nThe history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.
"]],["elementText",{"elementTextId":"3571"},["text","\n\n\"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to.\"
\n
– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.
Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.
It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. 1-Space-A0
\n1-Space-PS4The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in the late 1970s. And then, later, a National Institute of Immunology and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. 1-Space-A1
\nIn the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.
\n1-Space-V1Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. 1-Space-A3 (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. 1-Space-A2
\n1-Space-P1The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).
\n1-Space-PS2Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.
The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. 1-Space-A4
\n1-Space-PS1For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.
\n\n
The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.
But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.
However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. 1-India-A8
\r\n1-India-V1
Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on \"Biological Sciences in India\".
The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.
\r\n1-India-PS2At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching \"evidence-based conservation\" in 2003.
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Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala 1-India-A7, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world 1-India-A6, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. 1-India-A5
Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.
Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.
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This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. 1-Recognition-A12 To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. 1-Recognition-A9
Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)
In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.
\n1-Recognition-PS2Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.
\n1-Recognition-P1Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”
\n1-Recognition-V1In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. 1-Recognition-A10 And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. 1-Recognition-A11
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More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.
But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. 1-Reflection-A15
One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. 1-Reflection-A16
Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science 1-Reflection-A13, finding research questions 1-Reflection-A14 and the bridge between biology and society respectively. 1-Reflection-A17
\r\n1-Reflection-PS1These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.
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One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”
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.
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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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.”
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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
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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
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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.
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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 bistable behaviour, 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
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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 letter 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
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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.
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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: protein(s). 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 “Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”, 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”.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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
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
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.
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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.
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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.
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.”
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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
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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
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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.
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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 bistable behaviour, 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
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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 letter 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
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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.
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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: protein(s). 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 “Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”, 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”.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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
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
In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”
\nThe history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.
"]],["elementText",{"elementTextId":"3571"},["text","\n\n\"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to.\"
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– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.
Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.
It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. 1-Space-A0
\n1-Space-PS4The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in the late 1970s. And then, later, a National Institute of Immunology and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. 1-Space-A1
\nIn the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.
\n1-Space-V1Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. 1-Space-A3 (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. 1-Space-A2
\n1-Space-P1The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).
\n1-Space-PS2Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.
The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. 1-Space-A4
\n1-Space-PS1For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.
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The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.
But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.
However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. 1-India-A8
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Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on \"Biological Sciences in India\".
The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.
\r\n1-India-PS2At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching \"evidence-based conservation\" in 2003.
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Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala 1-India-A7, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world 1-India-A6, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. 1-India-A5
Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.
Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.
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This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. 1-Recognition-A12 To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. 1-Recognition-A9
Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)
In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.
\n1-Recognition-PS2Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.
\n1-Recognition-P1Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”
\n1-Recognition-V1In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. 1-Recognition-A10 And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. 1-Recognition-A11
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More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.
But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. 1-Reflection-A15
One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. 1-Reflection-A16
Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science 1-Reflection-A13, finding research questions 1-Reflection-A14 and the bridge between biology and society respectively. 1-Reflection-A17
\r\n1-Reflection-PS1These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.
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One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”
Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.
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At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.
When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. 3-Hiring-A4
It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. 3-Hiring-A5
One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.
NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.
Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.
The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. 3-Hiring-A1 And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. 3-Hiring-A2
The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. 3-Hiring-A3
The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.
Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.
K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). 3-Startup-A3
One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.
Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.
Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. 3-Startup-A2 Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.
Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, “extreme optimism and mild jugaad”.
More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.
MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.
The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. 3-Collab-A1
Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.
The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.
Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. 3-Collab-A3
For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was \"a great deal of collaboration and cooperation\" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4
When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.
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The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?
Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5
The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.
It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. 3-Students-A3
When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. 3-Students-A2 (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).
Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.
NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. 3-Students-A4
Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. 3-Students-A1
SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.
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One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone.
It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.
Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4
Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.
Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. 3-Scaling-A2 And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. 3-Scaling-A3
Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. 3-Scaling-A1
Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”
NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.
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Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.
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At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.
When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. 3-Hiring-A4
It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. 3-Hiring-A5
One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.
NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.
Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.
The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. 3-Hiring-A1 And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. 3-Hiring-A2
The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. 3-Hiring-A3
The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.
Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.
K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). 3-Startup-A3
One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.
Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.
Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. 3-Startup-A2 Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.
Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, “extreme optimism and mild jugaad”.
More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.
MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.
The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. 3-Collab-A1
Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.
The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.
Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. 3-Collab-A3
For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was \"a great deal of collaboration and cooperation\" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4
When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.
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The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?
Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5
The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.
It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. 3-Students-A3
When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. 3-Students-A2 (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).
Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.
NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. 3-Students-A4
Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. 3-Students-A1
SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.
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One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone.
It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.
Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4
Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.
Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. 3-Scaling-A2 And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. 3-Scaling-A3
Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. 3-Scaling-A1
Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”
NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.
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A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
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But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
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The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
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In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
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In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
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At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.”
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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
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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
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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.
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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 bistable behaviour, 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
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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 letter 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
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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.
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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: protein(s). 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 “Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”, 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”.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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
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
Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.
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At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.
When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. 3-Hiring-A4
It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. 3-Hiring-A5
One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.
NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.
Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.
The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. 3-Hiring-A1 And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. 3-Hiring-A2
The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. 3-Hiring-A3
The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.
Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.
K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). 3-Startup-A3
One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.
Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.
Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. 3-Startup-A2 Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.
Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, “extreme optimism and mild jugaad”.
More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.
MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.
The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. 3-Collab-A1
Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.
The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.
Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. 3-Collab-A3
For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was \"a great deal of collaboration and cooperation\" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4
When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.
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The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?
Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5
The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.
It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. 3-Students-A3
When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. 3-Students-A2 (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).
Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.
NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. 3-Students-A4
Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. 3-Students-A1
SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.
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One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone.
It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.
Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4
Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.
Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. 3-Scaling-A2 And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. 3-Scaling-A3
Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. 3-Scaling-A1
Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”
NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.
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A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
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But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
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The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
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In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
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In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
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At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.
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At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.
When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. 3-Hiring-A4
It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. 3-Hiring-A5
One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.
NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.
Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.
The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. 3-Hiring-A1 And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. 3-Hiring-A2
The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. 3-Hiring-A3
The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.
Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.
K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). 3-Startup-A3
One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.
Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.
Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. 3-Startup-A2 Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.
Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, “extreme optimism and mild jugaad”.
More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.
MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.
The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. 3-Collab-A1
Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.
The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.
Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. 3-Collab-A3
For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was \"a great deal of collaboration and cooperation\" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4
When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.
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The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?
Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5
The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.
It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. 3-Students-A3
When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. 3-Students-A2 (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).
Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.
NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. 3-Students-A4
Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. 3-Students-A1
SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.
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One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone.
It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.
Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4
Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.
Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. 3-Scaling-A2 And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. 3-Scaling-A3
Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. 3-Scaling-A1
Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”
NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.
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Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.
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At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.
When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. 3-Hiring-A4
It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. 3-Hiring-A5
One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.
NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.
Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.
The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. 3-Hiring-A1 And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. 3-Hiring-A2
The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. 3-Hiring-A3
The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.
Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.
K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). 3-Startup-A3
One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.
Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.
Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. 3-Startup-A2 Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.
Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, “extreme optimism and mild jugaad”.
More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.
MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.
The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. 3-Collab-A1
Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.
The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.
Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. 3-Collab-A3
For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was \"a great deal of collaboration and cooperation\" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4
When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.
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The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?
Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5
The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.
It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. 3-Students-A3
When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. 3-Students-A2 (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).
Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.
NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. 3-Students-A4
Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. 3-Students-A1
SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.
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One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone.
It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.
Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4
Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.
Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. 3-Scaling-A2 And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. 3-Scaling-A3
Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. 3-Scaling-A1
Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”
NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.
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Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.
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At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.
When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. 3-Hiring-A4
It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. 3-Hiring-A5
One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.
NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.
Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.
The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. 3-Hiring-A1 And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. 3-Hiring-A2
The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. 3-Hiring-A3
The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.
Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.
K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). 3-Startup-A3
One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.
Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.
Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. 3-Startup-A2 Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.
Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, “extreme optimism and mild jugaad”.
More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.
MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.
The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. 3-Collab-A1
Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.
The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.
Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. 3-Collab-A3
For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was \"a great deal of collaboration and cooperation\" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4
When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.
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The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?
Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5
The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.
It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. 3-Students-A3
When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. 3-Students-A2 (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).
Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.
NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. 3-Students-A4
Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. 3-Students-A1
SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.
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One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone.
It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.
Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4
Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.
Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. 3-Scaling-A2 And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. 3-Scaling-A3
Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. 3-Scaling-A1
Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”
NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.
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Stories on hiring faculty, on probing a question for a PhD, on the background to a scientific paper, are all stories that are specific to the history of a research institution. But there are some issues that are pressing in a broader society, and the institution happens to be a microcosm for these issues.
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In the Intersections theme, there are stories around gender equality – the perceptions of students, faculty and staff, past and present. And there are stories around hierarchy, class and the barriers to entry at the Centre. There’s a chapter with views – both historic and current – on interactions between members of the NCBS community. And there’s one on the world beyond the lab and the walls of the Centre. How has NCBS engaged with those outside?
These are complex and layered issues that go far beyond what can be covered here. But what institutional history can do is to repeat things that bear repeating, display some of the lines that divide people, and share some of the ways in which people erase them.
She has a spring in her step when she walks out of home every morning. She plugs in her earphones, gets on the bus to go to NCBS, and walks across campus to Dolna, the NCBS crèche. On this journey, she is in her own world. When she enters the crèche, she is in the world created by the toddlers. She is one of the caretakers at the crèche and she loves it. It’s a new world every time. She watches the toddlers learn to swim and the older ones dig up mud in the garden. There are a few quiet hours in the afternoon when the little ones nap. Come evening, there’s taekwondo, cycling, craft, and snack time. Oh, the food! In the summer, they go on field trips to zoos, museums, and radio stations. And one day, the kids even heard a story on Skype, narrated by a famous storyteller based in the UK. What’s not to like? Evenings are hard, both on the kids and her. The crèche is a dream for the kids and a refuge for her. Home is mundane and devoid of joy, there’s really nobody she can relate to. But at least she’ll be back with the kids tomorrow.
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The NCBS crèche is a model institution for other childcare centres in the city. It has a waiting list. Caretakers say new students with kids factor an available spot in the crèche into their decision making process before joining NCBS.
But it also seems stereotypical to start a section on gender by talking about a woman doing childcare. The only reason is to show how it began and show how it plays into society’s idea of gender roles. The campus did not have a formal child support structure till the late 1990s. This changed after 1998, when R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. What she noticed was that though other faculty members had toddlers, she was the first female faculty member with a child. R Sowdhamini proposed the idea of having a crèche. Listen to her talking about those early days, and the way she’s seen gender roles shape on campus. 7-Gender-A1
Looking after the kids and home is what Arlie Russell Hochschild famously termed the second shift in her 1989 book, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. It’s invisible work. But gender perceptions can also get reinforced without one’s realisation. For instance, at the crèche, the only male employees at the crèche are those who come and teach particular classes. The caretakers during the day are all women. And while it’s what many at the crèche may prefer, it also underlines an old idea of who a caretaker is. For a sense of how it was in an earlier time, listen to Kaleem Siddiqi’s memories of growing up in the TIFR campus in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the way house work was split up at the homes of the TIFR scientists, including his own, the Siddiqi family. 7-Gender-A4 And listen to Debakshi Mullick, current PhD student at NCBS, as she narrates her impressions on gender roles in the biosciences industry from her short experience as an intern recently. 7-Gender-A5
What more can one say about gender inequality in academia than what is widely covered – and in far more depth – in a variety of publications. IndiaBioscience, a non-profit program based out of an office at NCBS, has been instrumental in propping up the conversation on women in science. Still, repetition is useful. In his clip, Vidyanand Nanjundiah, faculty member at TIFR in 1980s, talks about the changes in gender imbalance in science from the 1970s to today. 7-Gender-A3
Arguably, the ratio at NCBS (a little over a third of the faculty are women) is better than many other science institutions across India (with the notable exception of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, where, in 2009, about half the 85 faculty members across the basic sciences were women). See the slideshow below for more.
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But there’s always more room to talk about gender, because biases come in many forms, some that are invisible to half the population. Take a look at Veronica Rodrigues' 1990 note below 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.
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Perhaps the biggest way to make systemic changes is to state the obvious again: have more representation of women across levels of science. Listen to a particular story by Vidita Vaidya, faculty member at TIFR. She starts with how Veronica Rodrigues would push her to publish when she was a new faculty member and needed good academic credentials for future funding. Vaidya then talks about being the only woman at a review in 2003, and the kind of questions she was asked. 7-Gender-A2 For more, see the article excerpt below by Gaiti Hasan, an NCBS faculty member, and hear her audio excerpt comparing today’s climate to when she started her career. 7-Gender-A0
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Perception has a far reaching effect. This chapter will become truly archival in nature when students like Mullick don’t notice the things they do before they hit the job market. The system’s not quite there yet.
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“If you come to NCBS, as soon as you hear them speaking, you know that most of the people are from upper middle class, not from villages,” said Dilawar Singh. “That is the general trend.”
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It’s just something he couldn’t help noticing when he first came to campus. Singh, a current PhD student at NCBS, grew up in Nichalpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh. He started learning English after completing school, and then moved to Chennai to study instrumentation engineering. There, at the library, he came across MN Srinivas’ book, “The Remembered Village”, which led to an interest in sociology. After a stint at IIT Bombay, he moved to NCBS, partly because, like many, he liked how it looked. Listen to his interview clip, where he compares the demographic at different campuses and shares his thoughts on social mobility. 7-Hierarchy-A1
English is the language of instruction, signage and communication at NCBS, and it is the language for mobility. Student potential – as in the case of interviews – is also judged in English. Satyajit Rath, faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII), agrees with Singh’s assessment of campus demographics. In his interview clip, he discusses the role English plays in reinforcing class distinctions at academic institutions like NII and NCBS, and how some sort of affirmative action is necessary to address class diversity. 7-Hierarchy-A2
Bring reservation up in review committees and meetings on campus, and it makes people very uncomfortable, said one faculty member. Nobody wants to go there. There are no reservation policies for faculty hiring or student selection. Permanent staff hiring has to follow a reservation policy. But this is again loosened for scientific and technical staff. Reservation only applies at the lowest level of hiring for this group. Sanjay Sane, a faculty member and former student at NCBS, shares some of his views in his interview. 7-Hierarchy-A3
There is also the question of hierarchy across the staff of NCBS. In the Centre’s early days, the security guards used to salute the senior faculty when they came in through the gates. It was a matter of habit. It’s what they’d been taught to do in their profession. The faculty put a halt to this practice.
In 1989, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a letter to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), assuring him that the new NCBS will hire locally. “We envisage that the bulk of the staff in the lower categories of employees will be from the local population,” he wrote. In an unintended way, the implied hiring mechanism also runs the risk of reinforcing certain hierarchies that are tied to language barriers. Very few faculty members and students speak Kannada. Many members of the support staff may not speak any other language. There are very few signs at NCBS in Kannada. There has been admirable effort to teach Kannada for many years. But it stopped earlier this year due to a combination of poor attendance and purse tightening.
From its start in 1991, NCBS envisioned a lean staff size, and forecast that a lot of the support work would be done by contract agencies. Ranjith, a lab manager at NCBS, narrates a story about hierarchies. He first discusses the disconnect that many staff members might have from the science at NCBS. He then shares his views on how hierarchies form as a result of having a vast pool of temporary staff or people under contract, which comes with its own insecurity. To be temporary, in a sense, is to also work under fear. 7-Hierarchy-A4
That said, there’s also been an effort since the beginning of NCBS to bend toward a more egalitarian culture. New students and staff quickly learn that they are expected to call faculty by their first names. New students remark how it put them off balance at first but it also helped break boundaries very quickly.
Going beyond names though, there’s a less visible class structure; addressing someone by their name does not level the field. Shannon Olsson, faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with her views on wrestling with inherent class structures and figuring out a way to work within and outside of them. 7-Hierarchy-A5
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Pick the vial off the rack, the one with Drosophila and old media. Pick up a new vial with fresh media from another rack, remove the cotton plug off the old vial, invert the old vial into the new one, watch the flies drift in, drop the old vial into its rack, plug the new vial with enough fresh cotton that it makes a proper plug and a little bit sticks out like a chef’s hat but not so much cotton that you are unable to plug the vial, pick up another old vial off the rack….That’s a few seconds. The fly facility technician is in the zone.
Flies have been part of NCBS since it began in 1991, and going all the way back to Obaid Siddiqi’s 1970s work at TIFR and Caltech. Today, NCBS is one of the very few centres in India with a dedicated fly facility. The facility supplies Drosophila lines to various research institutes in India as well as other places around the world. The facility staff performs a variety of tasks. One transfers fly across vials, another aligns Drosophila embryos, yet another injects the embryos as part of the facility’s process of producing transgenic Drosophila. But Deepti Trivedi, a scientist in charge of the fly facility, often wonders what her staff is thinking of when in the flow of fly work. There’s also a language barrier. She doesn’t speak Kannada. Many don’t speak English. In her interview, Trivedi shares some views on talking science with her staff. 7-NCBS Community-A1
Support staff members run NCBS. They clean bathrooms, weed lawns, process an invoice, manage a key bank, drive a shuttle van, serve coffee, order reagents, turn off the lights and yes, transfer flies. Being creative or engaged is not part of the job description. It might sometimes even be an unreasonable expectation. They do necessary work and occasionally work that nobody else wants to do. Sometimes people do what they do because they need the money. That’s the story of a significant proportion of NCBS staff, not just today but across its history.
The 1990-92 NCBS proposal is fairly emphatic about the way the institute would be structured: “What we wish to do was expressed pithily by Abraham Flexner when he proposed the creation of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. Flexner suggested that the Institute \"...should be small, that its staff and students or scholars should be few, that the administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate, that the member of the teaching staff, while freed from the waste of time involved in administrative work, should freely participate in decisions involving the character, quality and direction of its activities.” (Also see the Institution Building – Autonomy Theme).
The slideshow below shows an annexure from a 1996 Project Management Committee meeting. NCBS tries to keep a total of about 60 permanent non-academic staff, expecting that the facilities work will be done by people “on contract to external agencies”. Listen to the audio clip of Shaju Varghese, an administrative officer (services) at NCBS. He discusses his work at TIFR before he moved to NCBS in the early 1990s, the scale of work at NCBS today, and the limitations of a system with very few permanent staff members. 7-NCBS Community-A4 And listen to H Bhagya, member of the cleaning services at NCBS since 2001, as she describes her path to NCBS and interaction with the scientific work. 7-NCBS Community-A2
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In an outreach talk to the NCBS administration in 2009 on olfaction in Drosophila, Obaid Siddiqi started by saying that the scientific career was a self-rewarding one. And he wondered “Is administration – if it is mere service – self rewarding?” Check out the slideshow below for the whole talk. Highlighting the nature of service, this task of engaging the staff, lies on the shoulders of its management. For a while a few years ago, NCBS ran a successful seminar series for the staff where faculty members described their work to a broader audience.
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Every now and then, a unique relation develops between a faculty member and support staff member. In the early 2000s, Sunil Prabhakar joined Obaid Siddiqi's lab as an assistant, offering technical assistance for fly behavior experiments, stock keeping and management of laboratory consumables. He would later continue to do a Masters, and then pursue a PhD. (Hop over to the Sandbox – Space Tour theme to hear Trivedi’s recollections of the bantering between Siddiqi and Prabhakar). Also listen to Sanjay Sane, faculty member at NCBS, talk about the work of M Kemparaju, his long-term lab assistant with an astonishing knowledge of butterflies. To Sane, M Kemparaju is unique and irreplaceable “He’s the person who keeps us employed,” says Sane. And yet, he is relatively unemployable outside NCBS since nobody needs his skill as much as Sane does. 7-NCBS Community-A3
The career growth track for support staff has varied across the history of TIFR and NCBS. Lab assistants going on to do PhDs were not uncommon in TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU). For more on that, head to the Gallery for a couple of contrasting stories from Champakali Ayyub and PN Bhavsar.
Have you seen cells?
Yes, we’ve seen cells, reply the kids. They’re between 13 and 15 years old.
Have you seen real cells?
No, the kids haven’t seen real cells. So, H Krishnamurthy shows them cells in culture under the microscope.
There are some dead cells in this. Can you show me which ones are the dead cells?
And thus, on a Saturday morning, they start out on their first cell biology experiment.
In 1978, Krishnamurthy saw a laser for the first time. He also saw liquid nitrogen that Sunday. At the time, Krishnamurthy was a first year Pre University College (PUC) student in Bangalore. H Narasimahaiah, who had founded the Bangalore Science Forum in 1962, visited his college and announced that he was going to take the students to IISc. Krishnamurthy, who is the head of cytometry and imaging facilities at NCBS, has seen a few lasers since that Sunday. But that first time was special. “I can’t forget the day of seeing the laser and that excitement,” he says.
It’s one of the reasons Krishnamurthy can often be seen around NCBS on weekends with an entourage of students. They challenge him with their questions and ideas, as on that day, when he asked them to identify dead cells. Listen to his interview clip to learn more about how the kids went about solving his problem. 7-Outside-A1
There are perhaps a few broad ways to measure NCBS’ bond to the outside world.
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One is in how its members take their knowledge out and bring the broader community in. A scan of the activities across the campus would give one the sense that outreach is just part of the ethos. Some students teach at local schools, as do faculty members. Some, like Krishnamurthy, host students on campus. The Centre hosts a science journalism workshop every summer. The ecology, evolution and conservation biology researchers engage with the public through NCBS field stations and museum tours (and a Moth Day on campus). This past summer, Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee and Dasaradhi Palakodeti, faculty members at NCBS and InStem, started Perspectivo, “a magazine of the sciences and the humanities”. Visitors on campus tours are a routine sight. An active Research Development Office spearheads much of the effort. There’s an annual Open Day for the public in November. And for more than a decade, the Science and Society program at NCBS has been funding and hosting projects and events that dovetail science and the humanities and explore the history of science. It’s a lot to take in. And it can seem contradictory to the refrain that to be in NCBS is to live in a bubble, perhaps only illustrative of different perceptions. The thing of interest is the ready engagement of the faculty in outreach, especially since it doesn’t necessarily count toward their academic output. But when asked about the seemingly wide array of outreach activities, one faculty member looked bemused. Yes, he replied. It was a natural thing to do. How else should it be?
A second measure is to assess how NCBS community members carry out their work in a way that assimilates with broader societal concerns. One example is the MSc Wildlife Programme. When it started in 2003, it took a slightly different approach to education. This was in the nature of the program, which was outward looking and needed a student body that could engage with issues far beyond the lab. Listen to Ajith Kumar, NCBS faculty member and one of the founders of the programme, talk about where his students come from, where they go, and an eclectic curriculum from genetics to public policy to environmental law while they’re at the Centre. 7-Outside-A4
\nThese bridges to society could be seen as being part of a longer trend in spreading a scientific attitude. Arguably, it started decades ago at TIFR, most notably with the articles and opinion pieces written by BM Udgaonkar, a faculty member at TIFR. Udgaonkar would later go on to found the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. A glance at the list of publications intended at a general audience gives us an understanding of this body of work, especially the 1979-80 work on ‘Scientific Temper and Public Policy’.
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But coupled with these measures of engaging with the outside world is another one: to see how members of the NCBS community get involved with issues beyond the campus. At NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi is often cited as an example of a politically involved academic, especially from his younger days. In the featured video below, the economist, Prabhat Patnaik, summarizes the political involvement of Obaid Siddiqi while in college in the late 1940 and early 1950s.
Many senior members of the faculty themselves grew up in environments where they were tuned into the issues of the time. Listen, for instance, to the views of Upinder Bhalla, faculty member at NCBS. Bhalla grew up in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus with two parents heavily involved in political action, and he reflects on current campus life at NCBS. 7-Outside-A3 Here, the general perception is that students are growing up “apolitical”, as seen in one of the images in the slideshow above. Also hear Debakshi Mullick, a current PhD student at NCBS, for views on what happened at NCBS during the student pay hike protests in 2015. 7-Outside-A5
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Siddiqi did change his views over the years, compared to his student days. In July 1988, Society magazine (yes) published an interview of Obaid Siddiqi (“What's India's No. 1 microbiologist doing with fruit flies?”). The slideshow below has excerpts from that interview, one of the few where he freely shares his reflections on a leftist leaning in college, and the changes he saw in himself over time.
To engage with the outside world is, in a way, a process of introspection, about one’s professional growth, one's role as a member of the society, and the connections in between. In the last session of his 2003 oral history interview, Siddiqi shared his views on value questions in science:
“Well, value questions would always remain in the history [of science], they are the same questions. There are so many kinds of questions – one is the problem of spreading scientific attitude. This was assumed in early years in the Nehru era, the idea was that scientific attitude is a good thing and it will run up science against superstition. That was the accepted policy. Now that seems to have gone and now people have the idea that scientific method will not be the method for changing [attitude to superstitions]. So that question remains. The other value questions – that in science itself – do you have a right to pursue science for science [sake] or is [science] only a means of doing something for the good of others? That is also a value question – [particularly for] science in a poor country....
Human rights is a very strong value question. These questions are seen as trivial and they don’t think too much about this. But on these questions that scientists should speak out because scientists are to a large extent being supported by the government and government money. Scientists have become very timid. And in public they don’t express themselves on government policy. Now that is a value question. Scientists should be able to express their views on social, political [issues]. I think those are much more important things.”
Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.
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At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.
When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. 3-Hiring-A4
It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. 3-Hiring-A5
One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.
NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.
Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.
The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. 3-Hiring-A1 And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. 3-Hiring-A2
The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. 3-Hiring-A3
The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.
Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.
K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). 3-Startup-A3
One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.
Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.
Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. 3-Startup-A2 Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.
Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, “extreme optimism and mild jugaad”.
More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.
MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.
The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. 3-Collab-A1
Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.
The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.
Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. 3-Collab-A3
For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was \"a great deal of collaboration and cooperation\" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4
When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.
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The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?
Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5
The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.
It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. 3-Students-A3
When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. 3-Students-A2 (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).
Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.
NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. 3-Students-A4
Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. 3-Students-A1
SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.
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One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone.
It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.
Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4
Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.
Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. 3-Scaling-A2 And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. 3-Scaling-A3
Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. 3-Scaling-A1
Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”
NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.”
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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
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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
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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.
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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 bistable behaviour, 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
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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 letter 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
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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.
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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: protein(s). 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 “Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”, 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”.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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
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
In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”
\nThe history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.
"]],["elementText",{"elementTextId":"3571"},["text","\n\n\"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to.\"
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– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.
Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.
It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. 1-Space-A0
\n1-Space-PS4The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in the late 1970s. And then, later, a National Institute of Immunology and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. 1-Space-A1
\nIn the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.
\n1-Space-V1Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. 1-Space-A3 (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. 1-Space-A2
\n1-Space-P1The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).
\n1-Space-PS2Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.
The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. 1-Space-A4
\n1-Space-PS1For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.
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The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.
But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.
However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. 1-India-A8
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Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on \"Biological Sciences in India\".
The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.
\r\n1-India-PS2At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching \"evidence-based conservation\" in 2003.
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Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala 1-India-A7, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world 1-India-A6, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. 1-India-A5
Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.
Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.
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This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. 1-Recognition-A12 To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. 1-Recognition-A9
Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)
In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.
\n1-Recognition-PS2Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.
\n1-Recognition-P1Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”
\n1-Recognition-V1In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. 1-Recognition-A10 And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. 1-Recognition-A11
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More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.
But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. 1-Reflection-A15
One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. 1-Reflection-A16
Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science 1-Reflection-A13, finding research questions 1-Reflection-A14 and the bridge between biology and society respectively. 1-Reflection-A17
\r\n1-Reflection-PS1These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.
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One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”
Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.
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At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.
When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. 3-Hiring-A4
It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. 3-Hiring-A5
One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.
NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.
Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.
The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. 3-Hiring-A1 And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. 3-Hiring-A2
The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. 3-Hiring-A3
The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.
Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.
K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). 3-Startup-A3
One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.
Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.
Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. 3-Startup-A2 Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.
Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, “extreme optimism and mild jugaad”.
More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.
MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.
The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. 3-Collab-A1
Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.
The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.
Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. 3-Collab-A3
For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was \"a great deal of collaboration and cooperation\" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4
When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.
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The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?
Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5
The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.
It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. 3-Students-A3
When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. 3-Students-A2 (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).
Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.
NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. 3-Students-A4
Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. 3-Students-A1
SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.
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One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone.
It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.
Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4
Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.
Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. 3-Scaling-A2 And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. 3-Scaling-A3
Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. 3-Scaling-A1
Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”
NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.
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Stories on hiring faculty, on probing a question for a PhD, on the background to a scientific paper, are all stories that are specific to the history of a research institution. But there are some issues that are pressing in a broader society, and the institution happens to be a microcosm for these issues.
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In the Intersections theme, there are stories around gender equality – the perceptions of students, faculty and staff, past and present. And there are stories around hierarchy, class and the barriers to entry at the Centre. There’s a chapter with views – both historic and current – on interactions between members of the NCBS community. And there’s one on the world beyond the lab and the walls of the Centre. How has NCBS engaged with those outside?
These are complex and layered issues that go far beyond what can be covered here. But what institutional history can do is to repeat things that bear repeating, display some of the lines that divide people, and share some of the ways in which people erase them.
She has a spring in her step when she walks out of home every morning. She plugs in her earphones, gets on the bus to go to NCBS, and walks across campus to Dolna, the NCBS crèche. On this journey, she is in her own world. When she enters the crèche, she is in the world created by the toddlers. She is one of the caretakers at the crèche and she loves it. It’s a new world every time. She watches the toddlers learn to swim and the older ones dig up mud in the garden. There are a few quiet hours in the afternoon when the little ones nap. Come evening, there’s taekwondo, cycling, craft, and snack time. Oh, the food! In the summer, they go on field trips to zoos, museums, and radio stations. And one day, the kids even heard a story on Skype, narrated by a famous storyteller based in the UK. What’s not to like? Evenings are hard, both on the kids and her. The crèche is a dream for the kids and a refuge for her. Home is mundane and devoid of joy, there’s really nobody she can relate to. But at least she’ll be back with the kids tomorrow.
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The NCBS crèche is a model institution for other childcare centres in the city. It has a waiting list. Caretakers say new students with kids factor an available spot in the crèche into their decision making process before joining NCBS.
But it also seems stereotypical to start a section on gender by talking about a woman doing childcare. The only reason is to show how it began and show how it plays into society’s idea of gender roles. The campus did not have a formal child support structure till the late 1990s. This changed after 1998, when R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. What she noticed was that though other faculty members had toddlers, she was the first female faculty member with a child. R Sowdhamini proposed the idea of having a crèche. Listen to her talking about those early days, and the way she’s seen gender roles shape on campus. 7-Gender-A1
Looking after the kids and home is what Arlie Russell Hochschild famously termed the second shift in her 1989 book, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. It’s invisible work. But gender perceptions can also get reinforced without one’s realisation. For instance, at the crèche, the only male employees at the crèche are those who come and teach particular classes. The caretakers during the day are all women. And while it’s what many at the crèche may prefer, it also underlines an old idea of who a caretaker is. For a sense of how it was in an earlier time, listen to Kaleem Siddiqi’s memories of growing up in the TIFR campus in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the way house work was split up at the homes of the TIFR scientists, including his own, the Siddiqi family. 7-Gender-A4 And listen to Debakshi Mullick, current PhD student at NCBS, as she narrates her impressions on gender roles in the biosciences industry from her short experience as an intern recently. 7-Gender-A5
What more can one say about gender inequality in academia than what is widely covered – and in far more depth – in a variety of publications. IndiaBioscience, a non-profit program based out of an office at NCBS, has been instrumental in propping up the conversation on women in science. Still, repetition is useful. In his clip, Vidyanand Nanjundiah, faculty member at TIFR in 1980s, talks about the changes in gender imbalance in science from the 1970s to today. 7-Gender-A3
Arguably, the ratio at NCBS (a little over a third of the faculty are women) is better than many other science institutions across India (with the notable exception of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, where, in 2009, about half the 85 faculty members across the basic sciences were women). See the slideshow below for more.
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But there’s always more room to talk about gender, because biases come in many forms, some that are invisible to half the population. Take a look at Veronica Rodrigues' 1990 note below 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.
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Perhaps the biggest way to make systemic changes is to state the obvious again: have more representation of women across levels of science. Listen to a particular story by Vidita Vaidya, faculty member at TIFR. She starts with how Veronica Rodrigues would push her to publish when she was a new faculty member and needed good academic credentials for future funding. Vaidya then talks about being the only woman at a review in 2003, and the kind of questions she was asked. 7-Gender-A2 For more, see the article excerpt below by Gaiti Hasan, an NCBS faculty member, and hear her audio excerpt comparing today’s climate to when she started her career. 7-Gender-A0
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Perception has a far reaching effect. This chapter will become truly archival in nature when students like Mullick don’t notice the things they do before they hit the job market. The system’s not quite there yet.
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“If you come to NCBS, as soon as you hear them speaking, you know that most of the people are from upper middle class, not from villages,” said Dilawar Singh. “That is the general trend.”
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It’s just something he couldn’t help noticing when he first came to campus. Singh, a current PhD student at NCBS, grew up in Nichalpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh. He started learning English after completing school, and then moved to Chennai to study instrumentation engineering. There, at the library, he came across MN Srinivas’ book, “The Remembered Village”, which led to an interest in sociology. After a stint at IIT Bombay, he moved to NCBS, partly because, like many, he liked how it looked. Listen to his interview clip, where he compares the demographic at different campuses and shares his thoughts on social mobility. 7-Hierarchy-A1
English is the language of instruction, signage and communication at NCBS, and it is the language for mobility. Student potential – as in the case of interviews – is also judged in English. Satyajit Rath, faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII), agrees with Singh’s assessment of campus demographics. In his interview clip, he discusses the role English plays in reinforcing class distinctions at academic institutions like NII and NCBS, and how some sort of affirmative action is necessary to address class diversity. 7-Hierarchy-A2
Bring reservation up in review committees and meetings on campus, and it makes people very uncomfortable, said one faculty member. Nobody wants to go there. There are no reservation policies for faculty hiring or student selection. Permanent staff hiring has to follow a reservation policy. But this is again loosened for scientific and technical staff. Reservation only applies at the lowest level of hiring for this group. Sanjay Sane, a faculty member and former student at NCBS, shares some of his views in his interview. 7-Hierarchy-A3
There is also the question of hierarchy across the staff of NCBS. In the Centre’s early days, the security guards used to salute the senior faculty when they came in through the gates. It was a matter of habit. It’s what they’d been taught to do in their profession. The faculty put a halt to this practice.
In 1989, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a letter to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), assuring him that the new NCBS will hire locally. “We envisage that the bulk of the staff in the lower categories of employees will be from the local population,” he wrote. In an unintended way, the implied hiring mechanism also runs the risk of reinforcing certain hierarchies that are tied to language barriers. Very few faculty members and students speak Kannada. Many members of the support staff may not speak any other language. There are very few signs at NCBS in Kannada. There has been admirable effort to teach Kannada for many years. But it stopped earlier this year due to a combination of poor attendance and purse tightening.
From its start in 1991, NCBS envisioned a lean staff size, and forecast that a lot of the support work would be done by contract agencies. Ranjith, a lab manager at NCBS, narrates a story about hierarchies. He first discusses the disconnect that many staff members might have from the science at NCBS. He then shares his views on how hierarchies form as a result of having a vast pool of temporary staff or people under contract, which comes with its own insecurity. To be temporary, in a sense, is to also work under fear. 7-Hierarchy-A4
That said, there’s also been an effort since the beginning of NCBS to bend toward a more egalitarian culture. New students and staff quickly learn that they are expected to call faculty by their first names. New students remark how it put them off balance at first but it also helped break boundaries very quickly.
Going beyond names though, there’s a less visible class structure; addressing someone by their name does not level the field. Shannon Olsson, faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with her views on wrestling with inherent class structures and figuring out a way to work within and outside of them. 7-Hierarchy-A5
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Pick the vial off the rack, the one with Drosophila and old media. Pick up a new vial with fresh media from another rack, remove the cotton plug off the old vial, invert the old vial into the new one, watch the flies drift in, drop the old vial into its rack, plug the new vial with enough fresh cotton that it makes a proper plug and a little bit sticks out like a chef’s hat but not so much cotton that you are unable to plug the vial, pick up another old vial off the rack….That’s a few seconds. The fly facility technician is in the zone.
Flies have been part of NCBS since it began in 1991, and going all the way back to Obaid Siddiqi’s 1970s work at TIFR and Caltech. Today, NCBS is one of the very few centres in India with a dedicated fly facility. The facility supplies Drosophila lines to various research institutes in India as well as other places around the world. The facility staff performs a variety of tasks. One transfers fly across vials, another aligns Drosophila embryos, yet another injects the embryos as part of the facility’s process of producing transgenic Drosophila. But Deepti Trivedi, a scientist in charge of the fly facility, often wonders what her staff is thinking of when in the flow of fly work. There’s also a language barrier. She doesn’t speak Kannada. Many don’t speak English. In her interview, Trivedi shares some views on talking science with her staff. 7-NCBS Community-A1
Support staff members run NCBS. They clean bathrooms, weed lawns, process an invoice, manage a key bank, drive a shuttle van, serve coffee, order reagents, turn off the lights and yes, transfer flies. Being creative or engaged is not part of the job description. It might sometimes even be an unreasonable expectation. They do necessary work and occasionally work that nobody else wants to do. Sometimes people do what they do because they need the money. That’s the story of a significant proportion of NCBS staff, not just today but across its history.
The 1990-92 NCBS proposal is fairly emphatic about the way the institute would be structured: “What we wish to do was expressed pithily by Abraham Flexner when he proposed the creation of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. Flexner suggested that the Institute \"...should be small, that its staff and students or scholars should be few, that the administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate, that the member of the teaching staff, while freed from the waste of time involved in administrative work, should freely participate in decisions involving the character, quality and direction of its activities.” (Also see the Institution Building – Autonomy Theme).
The slideshow below shows an annexure from a 1996 Project Management Committee meeting. NCBS tries to keep a total of about 60 permanent non-academic staff, expecting that the facilities work will be done by people “on contract to external agencies”. Listen to the audio clip of Shaju Varghese, an administrative officer (services) at NCBS. He discusses his work at TIFR before he moved to NCBS in the early 1990s, the scale of work at NCBS today, and the limitations of a system with very few permanent staff members. 7-NCBS Community-A4 And listen to H Bhagya, member of the cleaning services at NCBS since 2001, as she describes her path to NCBS and interaction with the scientific work. 7-NCBS Community-A2
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In an outreach talk to the NCBS administration in 2009 on olfaction in Drosophila, Obaid Siddiqi started by saying that the scientific career was a self-rewarding one. And he wondered “Is administration – if it is mere service – self rewarding?” Check out the slideshow below for the whole talk. Highlighting the nature of service, this task of engaging the staff, lies on the shoulders of its management. For a while a few years ago, NCBS ran a successful seminar series for the staff where faculty members described their work to a broader audience.
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Every now and then, a unique relation develops between a faculty member and support staff member. In the early 2000s, Sunil Prabhakar joined Obaid Siddiqi's lab as an assistant, offering technical assistance for fly behavior experiments, stock keeping and management of laboratory consumables. He would later continue to do a Masters, and then pursue a PhD. (Hop over to the Sandbox – Space Tour theme to hear Trivedi’s recollections of the bantering between Siddiqi and Prabhakar). Also listen to Sanjay Sane, faculty member at NCBS, talk about the work of M Kemparaju, his long-term lab assistant with an astonishing knowledge of butterflies. To Sane, M Kemparaju is unique and irreplaceable “He’s the person who keeps us employed,” says Sane. And yet, he is relatively unemployable outside NCBS since nobody needs his skill as much as Sane does. 7-NCBS Community-A3
The career growth track for support staff has varied across the history of TIFR and NCBS. Lab assistants going on to do PhDs were not uncommon in TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU). For more on that, head to the Gallery for a couple of contrasting stories from Champakali Ayyub and PN Bhavsar.
Have you seen cells?
Yes, we’ve seen cells, reply the kids. They’re between 13 and 15 years old.
Have you seen real cells?
No, the kids haven’t seen real cells. So, H Krishnamurthy shows them cells in culture under the microscope.
There are some dead cells in this. Can you show me which ones are the dead cells?
And thus, on a Saturday morning, they start out on their first cell biology experiment.
In 1978, Krishnamurthy saw a laser for the first time. He also saw liquid nitrogen that Sunday. At the time, Krishnamurthy was a first year Pre University College (PUC) student in Bangalore. H Narasimahaiah, who had founded the Bangalore Science Forum in 1962, visited his college and announced that he was going to take the students to IISc. Krishnamurthy, who is the head of cytometry and imaging facilities at NCBS, has seen a few lasers since that Sunday. But that first time was special. “I can’t forget the day of seeing the laser and that excitement,” he says.
It’s one of the reasons Krishnamurthy can often be seen around NCBS on weekends with an entourage of students. They challenge him with their questions and ideas, as on that day, when he asked them to identify dead cells. Listen to his interview clip to learn more about how the kids went about solving his problem. 7-Outside-A1
There are perhaps a few broad ways to measure NCBS’ bond to the outside world.
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One is in how its members take their knowledge out and bring the broader community in. A scan of the activities across the campus would give one the sense that outreach is just part of the ethos. Some students teach at local schools, as do faculty members. Some, like Krishnamurthy, host students on campus. The Centre hosts a science journalism workshop every summer. The ecology, evolution and conservation biology researchers engage with the public through NCBS field stations and museum tours (and a Moth Day on campus). This past summer, Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee and Dasaradhi Palakodeti, faculty members at NCBS and InStem, started Perspectivo, “a magazine of the sciences and the humanities”. Visitors on campus tours are a routine sight. An active Research Development Office spearheads much of the effort. There’s an annual Open Day for the public in November. And for more than a decade, the Science and Society program at NCBS has been funding and hosting projects and events that dovetail science and the humanities and explore the history of science. It’s a lot to take in. And it can seem contradictory to the refrain that to be in NCBS is to live in a bubble, perhaps only illustrative of different perceptions. The thing of interest is the ready engagement of the faculty in outreach, especially since it doesn’t necessarily count toward their academic output. But when asked about the seemingly wide array of outreach activities, one faculty member looked bemused. Yes, he replied. It was a natural thing to do. How else should it be?
A second measure is to assess how NCBS community members carry out their work in a way that assimilates with broader societal concerns. One example is the MSc Wildlife Programme. When it started in 2003, it took a slightly different approach to education. This was in the nature of the program, which was outward looking and needed a student body that could engage with issues far beyond the lab. Listen to Ajith Kumar, NCBS faculty member and one of the founders of the programme, talk about where his students come from, where they go, and an eclectic curriculum from genetics to public policy to environmental law while they’re at the Centre. 7-Outside-A4
\nThese bridges to society could be seen as being part of a longer trend in spreading a scientific attitude. Arguably, it started decades ago at TIFR, most notably with the articles and opinion pieces written by BM Udgaonkar, a faculty member at TIFR. Udgaonkar would later go on to found the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. A glance at the list of publications intended at a general audience gives us an understanding of this body of work, especially the 1979-80 work on ‘Scientific Temper and Public Policy’.
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But coupled with these measures of engaging with the outside world is another one: to see how members of the NCBS community get involved with issues beyond the campus. At NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi is often cited as an example of a politically involved academic, especially from his younger days. In the featured video below, the economist, Prabhat Patnaik, summarizes the political involvement of Obaid Siddiqi while in college in the late 1940 and early 1950s.
Many senior members of the faculty themselves grew up in environments where they were tuned into the issues of the time. Listen, for instance, to the views of Upinder Bhalla, faculty member at NCBS. Bhalla grew up in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus with two parents heavily involved in political action, and he reflects on current campus life at NCBS. 7-Outside-A3 Here, the general perception is that students are growing up “apolitical”, as seen in one of the images in the slideshow above. Also hear Debakshi Mullick, a current PhD student at NCBS, for views on what happened at NCBS during the student pay hike protests in 2015. 7-Outside-A5
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Siddiqi did change his views over the years, compared to his student days. In July 1988, Society magazine (yes) published an interview of Obaid Siddiqi (“What's India's No. 1 microbiologist doing with fruit flies?”). The slideshow below has excerpts from that interview, one of the few where he freely shares his reflections on a leftist leaning in college, and the changes he saw in himself over time.
To engage with the outside world is, in a way, a process of introspection, about one’s professional growth, one's role as a member of the society, and the connections in between. In the last session of his 2003 oral history interview, Siddiqi shared his views on value questions in science:
“Well, value questions would always remain in the history [of science], they are the same questions. There are so many kinds of questions – one is the problem of spreading scientific attitude. This was assumed in early years in the Nehru era, the idea was that scientific attitude is a good thing and it will run up science against superstition. That was the accepted policy. Now that seems to have gone and now people have the idea that scientific method will not be the method for changing [attitude to superstitions]. So that question remains. The other value questions – that in science itself – do you have a right to pursue science for science [sake] or is [science] only a means of doing something for the good of others? That is also a value question – [particularly for] science in a poor country....
Human rights is a very strong value question. These questions are seen as trivial and they don’t think too much about this. But on these questions that scientists should speak out because scientists are to a large extent being supported by the government and government money. Scientists have become very timid. And in public they don’t express themselves on government policy. Now that is a value question. Scientists should be able to express their views on social, political [issues]. I think those are much more important things.”
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.
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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.
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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.
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.”
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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
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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
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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.
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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 bistable behaviour, 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
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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 letter 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
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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.
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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: protein(s). 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 “Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”, 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”.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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
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
Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.
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At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.
When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. 3-Hiring-A4
It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. 3-Hiring-A5
One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.
NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.
Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.
The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. 3-Hiring-A1 And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. 3-Hiring-A2
The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. 3-Hiring-A3
The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.
Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.
K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). 3-Startup-A3
One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.
Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.
Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. 3-Startup-A2 Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.
Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, “extreme optimism and mild jugaad”.
More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.
MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.
The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. 3-Collab-A1
Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.
The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.
Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. 3-Collab-A3
For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was \"a great deal of collaboration and cooperation\" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4
When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.
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The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?
Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5
The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.
It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. 3-Students-A3
When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. 3-Students-A2 (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).
Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.
NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. 3-Students-A4
Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. 3-Students-A1
SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.
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One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone.
It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.
Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4
Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.
Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. 3-Scaling-A2 And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. 3-Scaling-A3
Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. 3-Scaling-A1
Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”
NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.”
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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
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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
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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.
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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 bistable behaviour, 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
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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 letter 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
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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.
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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: protein(s). 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 “Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”, 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”.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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
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
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.
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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.
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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.
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.”
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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
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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
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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.
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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 bistable behaviour, 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
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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 letter 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
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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.
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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: protein(s). 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 “Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”, 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”.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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
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
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.
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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.
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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.
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.”
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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
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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
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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.
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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 bistable behaviour, 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
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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 letter 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
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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.
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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: protein(s). 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 “Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”, 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”.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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
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
Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.
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At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.
When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. 3-Hiring-A4
It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. 3-Hiring-A5
One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.
NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.
Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.
The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. 3-Hiring-A1 And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. 3-Hiring-A2
The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. 3-Hiring-A3
The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.
Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.
K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). 3-Startup-A3
One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.
Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.
Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. 3-Startup-A2 Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.
Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, “extreme optimism and mild jugaad”.
More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.
MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.
The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. 3-Collab-A1
Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.
The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.
Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. 3-Collab-A3
For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was \"a great deal of collaboration and cooperation\" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4
When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.
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The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?
Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5
The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.
It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. 3-Students-A3
When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. 3-Students-A2 (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).
Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.
NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. 3-Students-A4
Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. 3-Students-A1
SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.
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One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone.
It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.
Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4
Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.
Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. 3-Scaling-A2 And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. 3-Scaling-A3
Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. 3-Scaling-A1
Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”
NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.”
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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
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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
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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.
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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 bistable behaviour, 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
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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 letter 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
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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.
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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: protein(s). 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 “Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”, 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”.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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
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
A need for more space and autonomy is echoed throughout the history of TIFR. It’s seen in the development of NCBS, the Department of Biological Sciences at TIFR, and at other national centres that grew out of TIFR.
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But the desire to have an autonomous space for biology is very different from having the means to get it. The odds are typically stacked against the process. And so, there exists an ever-fragile gap between idea and realization.
The chapters in the Institution Building theme dig into the aftermath of an accepted idea. To build NCBS was to wade through a paper trail justifying the funding agency, the choice of city, and the very need for an NCBS, all steps that seemed tedious in the heat of the moment, and instructive in hindsight. Building NCBS was also a serious quest to define the relationship between scientific research and the built landscape, down to every tree.
In the late 1980s, the TIFR Centre at IISc was like a waypoint for TIFR scientists working on large-scale projects. By July 1989, Govind Swarup’s team of radio astronomers, which had spent the previous few years at the Centre, packed up and moved to Pune to build the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope. Soon after they left, the first biologists moved in from TIFR Bombay. They would stay there till the completion of the NCBS campus on land leased from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS).
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The radio astronomy group in Pune morphed into an independent national centre for radio astrophysics (NCRA), much like the independent biology centre coming up in Bangalore. TIFR has had a tradition of developing different and spinning them off as separate research centres. This incubator role is perhaps one of its biggest contributions to the spread of Indian science. But the degree of decentralisation from the mothership tends to not be completely spelt out in documents. Some of it is covered in board meetings. Listen, for instance, to Govind Swarup. He narrates a unique TIFR Council meeting in July 1993 to discuss the trajectory of such new centres incubated at TIFR 2-Autonomy-A0. These meeting minutes, along with a set of guidelines sent in May 1992 by Virendra Singh, then director of TIFR, can be seen in the slideshow below.
Molecular biology started in one large lab space in the 1960s, as shown in the featured image. But to grow, the discipline needed more physical lab space. The first slideshow is an extended extract from the 1990-92 NCBS proposal. It outlines the Centre’s research objective that underscores the need for space. NCBS’ issue of needing space was also closely linked to autonomy from an institutional setting that was not always receptive to the needs of biology. In small and big ways across TIFR history, this strained relation between disciplines surfaces.
\n2-Autonomy-PS2Biology could still use more space in TIFR Mumbai. In the late 1990s, around the time the NCBS construction was being completed in Bangalore, the TIFR Department of Biological Sciences submitted a petition for a new biology building on the TIFR campus. Listen to Shobhona Sharma’s interview excerpt to learn about the decade-plus process that got sidelined partly by institutional disinterest. 2-Autonomy-A2
\n2-Autonomy-PS1Autonomy for NCBS is mostly to do with administrative oversight and it has had to figure out the right balance over the last 25 years. Listen to Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, who discusses the need for record keeping as institutions grow and offers some historical context for the origins of the tussle. 2-Autonomy-A4
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In 1991, Siddiqi shared his concerns at a National Institute for Advanced Studies speech that “one of the major impediments that hinder the progress of science in our country is its administrative structure”. The NCBS proposal quotes Abraham Flexner who proposed the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and said that “administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate”. In his audio clip, PP Ranjith reflects on his role as the glue between administration and science. 2-Autonomy-A3
Arguably, the distance and autonomy has let NCBS accomplish much. Listen to Vidita Vaidya for a view on NCBS’ autonomy from the TIFR biology faculty and not letting the minutiae disrupt the view of the broader accomplishments. 2-Autonomy-A1 And on a lighter note, see K VijayRaghavan’s talk below on when one of NCBS' own faculty members, KS Krishnan, decided to set up a remote marine biology laboratory.
More? Check out the Gallery for more oral history interview excerpts from Krishanu Ray, Obaid Siddiqi, and Virendra Singh on autonomy.
In the early 1980s, Vidyanand Nanjundiah and Obaid Siddiqi, faculty members at TIFR, worked on a proposal for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. It was to be set up as an independent space under the TIFR umbrella. The proposal went through after a series of conversations within TIFR, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Planning Commission. The next step was to find land. It was the beginning of a trail of papers.
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In early 1986, Nanjundiah, along with two other TIFR colleagues, came to Bangalore to scout places. They needed help from someone who knew the system and would bat for them in Bangalore. Listen to his interview as he reflects on the critical role played by H Sharat Chandra, a professor at IISc, in negotiations with the Karnataka government.
The biology centre project was still up in the air through the late 1980s despite the approval from the Planning Commission. The slideshow below has almost three dozen records placed in sequence, to give a flavour of the negotiations happening at the time. (Also see the Timeline section in the Sandbox theme). It shows how non-consequential each paper document seemed all the way up to the Oct 22 Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) sanction letter (or the Oct 23 letter, if one counts that the Oct 22 letter had a typo in the financial breakdown).
\n2-Paper-PS1Hurdles and pressures came at every step. In his audio clip, BV Sreekantan talks about the resistance from the Karnataka Government to offer new land to external scientific institutions. They circumvented this by looking for land within another institution. 2-Paper-A3 But even after they had more or less finalized on Bangalore, they just couldn’t find the right option.
\n2-Paper-PS2Then, after a series of negotiations, it looked like TIFR would get land on the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) campus. The TIFR Council discusses this in a June 1989 meeting -- see the slideshow above. In this meeting, the Council approved the UAS campus land, and also hiring of faculty and staff. But their approval wasn’t the end of the road. There was no ink on a dotted line on any real estate document. And in the end, that’s often what matters. By mid 1990, Jayant Udgaonkar, who had been made an offer to join the new Bangalore centre, was starting to doubt whether it would come up and shot off a letter to the director of TIFR. Udgaonkar narrates this incident. 2-Paper-A1 K VijayRaghavan, also a young prospective faculty member at the time, recounts the pace of work and the different ways in which they and Siddiqi approached the problem. 2-Paper-A4
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At the same time, there was a push for them to look for land in Maharashtra. Listen to TM Sahadevan’s memory of that time, an odd situation when they were being offered tons of space in different parts of Maharashtra. But the place where they really wanted land – Bangalore – was becoming a struggle. 2-Paper-A2
Finally, on February 8, 1991, UAS and TIFR signed a lease deed. And after a few more months, the DAE sent the sanction order for the Centre. But it is only in hindsight that the Oct 22 letter carries weight. This is especially evident when we see the TIFR Council Meeting minutes from October 16, 1991, where they discuss the projected plans for the new biology centre campus in Bangalore. There is no mention of an impending sanction order from the DAE, suggesting it was viewed as more of a formality. If anything, an illegible photocopy of a letter from the Bangalore authorities on Mar 2, 1991, to clear the lease deed between UAS and TIFR, could be viewed as the last bureaucratic hurdle. Whatever followed after was pro forma.
Want to see more? Check the Gallery for more oral history excerpts and documents.
It is six o’clock in the evening and traffic has come to its daily chest-thumping halt on the Airport road just south of NCBS. Nobody is moving, a lot of cars are honking, and the air over the flyover is thick with exhaust. UB Poornima, the chief resident architect at NCBS, looks up from her phone and out of her car window at the full jaam, as these things are called in Bangalore. And a question pops up in her mind. The construction agency that built this flyover – would it have planned for this kind of a dead load, this static weight of dozens of cars? That’s her question.
Planning and visualising is, more often than not, Poornima’s preoccupation. She joined NCBS after responding to a job posting in 1994, partly to be the link between NCBS faculty, Raj Rewal, the NCBS architect based in Delhi, and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) civil engineering team. Today, Poornima is one of the few continuous links to the original campus design. Listen to the audio excerpt where she talks about the form of a building, her philosophy in design, and how it feeds back into the function of the building. 2-Architecture-A1
Raj Rewal’s design built on his desire to use natural material quarried from the hills beyond Bangalore. His plan for NCBS included a series of inter-linked and landscaped courtyards, and the main research building was designed with individual lab spaces. Check out Rewal’s audio slideshow, where he meditates on the rasa of architecture of a science institution.
The form of a building is the least likely element to change, and it has long lasting impacts. Have a look at the slideshow below that chronicles documents and photos from the start to end of the first phase of NCBS’ construction.
Siddiqi was known to be fairly insistent if he felt strongly about something. And he usually had his way. Listen, for instance, to Shobhona Sharma as she shares a story from TIFR where she had to accede to his insistence for exactly six feet wide lab benches. 2-Architecture-A3 And in her interview excerpt, Poornima shares a story on Siddiqi and Rewal debating over the size of windows on what is now the Simons Centre building, and the after effects of their decisions. 2-Architecture-A2
Much of institution building – architecture included – is about imagining. It started with the idea of moving to the then pensioner’s paradise. Ironically, partly because Bombay was becoming too congested, but driven more by a need to be somewhere else that was also a good climate for biology. Listen, for instance, to Obaid Siddiqi’s interview, where he talks about his informal survey of scientists to finalize Bangalore. 2-Architecture-A4
In the early days, NCBS had called SD Vaidya, one of India’s first landscape architects, to walk around and build a vision for its future look. This was to imagine it, as Siddiqi had commented then, when the trees have grown. The slideshow below gives a glimpse into the early design models, to landscaping and to early days of an aesthetic committee.
The difficulty of space design, especially communal spaces, is that they are interpreted differently by floating populations. How a space eventually gets used is anybody’s guess. The new Southern Laboratories Complex (SLC) is a departure from the older buildings, opting for an open shared lab space among many research groups, and potentially more interaction between groups. But it is also a space where more theft has been reported; the SLC is now dotted with web-cameras.
Take another example of space use. The elevation view of the NCBS campus shows columnar structures on top of the buildings. When Raj Rewal designed NCBS, he included these chatris on the roofline, places on the roof that would provide respite from heat. When they designed it, they felt these would be spots where staff could stand in the shade and discuss their work. That doesn’t happen. Instead, as it turns out, air conditioner modules occupy some of the chatris today.
More? Check the Gallery for more photos from the construction phase.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.”
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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
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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
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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.
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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 bistable behaviour, 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
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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 letter 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
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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.
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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: protein(s). 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 “Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”, 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”.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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
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
Stories on hiring faculty, on probing a question for a PhD, on the background to a scientific paper, are all stories that are specific to the history of a research institution. But there are some issues that are pressing in a broader society, and the institution happens to be a microcosm for these issues.
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In the Intersections theme, there are stories around gender equality – the perceptions of students, faculty and staff, past and present. And there are stories around hierarchy, class and the barriers to entry at the Centre. There’s a chapter with views – both historic and current – on interactions between members of the NCBS community. And there’s one on the world beyond the lab and the walls of the Centre. How has NCBS engaged with those outside?
These are complex and layered issues that go far beyond what can be covered here. But what institutional history can do is to repeat things that bear repeating, display some of the lines that divide people, and share some of the ways in which people erase them.
She has a spring in her step when she walks out of home every morning. She plugs in her earphones, gets on the bus to go to NCBS, and walks across campus to Dolna, the NCBS crèche. On this journey, she is in her own world. When she enters the crèche, she is in the world created by the toddlers. She is one of the caretakers at the crèche and she loves it. It’s a new world every time. She watches the toddlers learn to swim and the older ones dig up mud in the garden. There are a few quiet hours in the afternoon when the little ones nap. Come evening, there’s taekwondo, cycling, craft, and snack time. Oh, the food! In the summer, they go on field trips to zoos, museums, and radio stations. And one day, the kids even heard a story on Skype, narrated by a famous storyteller based in the UK. What’s not to like? Evenings are hard, both on the kids and her. The crèche is a dream for the kids and a refuge for her. Home is mundane and devoid of joy, there’s really nobody she can relate to. But at least she’ll be back with the kids tomorrow.
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The NCBS crèche is a model institution for other childcare centres in the city. It has a waiting list. Caretakers say new students with kids factor an available spot in the crèche into their decision making process before joining NCBS.
But it also seems stereotypical to start a section on gender by talking about a woman doing childcare. The only reason is to show how it began and show how it plays into society’s idea of gender roles. The campus did not have a formal child support structure till the late 1990s. This changed after 1998, when R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. What she noticed was that though other faculty members had toddlers, she was the first female faculty member with a child. R Sowdhamini proposed the idea of having a crèche. Listen to her talking about those early days, and the way she’s seen gender roles shape on campus. 7-Gender-A1
Looking after the kids and home is what Arlie Russell Hochschild famously termed the second shift in her 1989 book, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. It’s invisible work. But gender perceptions can also get reinforced without one’s realisation. For instance, at the crèche, the only male employees at the crèche are those who come and teach particular classes. The caretakers during the day are all women. And while it’s what many at the crèche may prefer, it also underlines an old idea of who a caretaker is. For a sense of how it was in an earlier time, listen to Kaleem Siddiqi’s memories of growing up in the TIFR campus in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the way house work was split up at the homes of the TIFR scientists, including his own, the Siddiqi family. 7-Gender-A4 And listen to Debakshi Mullick, current PhD student at NCBS, as she narrates her impressions on gender roles in the biosciences industry from her short experience as an intern recently. 7-Gender-A5
What more can one say about gender inequality in academia than what is widely covered – and in far more depth – in a variety of publications. IndiaBioscience, a non-profit program based out of an office at NCBS, has been instrumental in propping up the conversation on women in science. Still, repetition is useful. In his clip, Vidyanand Nanjundiah, faculty member at TIFR in 1980s, talks about the changes in gender imbalance in science from the 1970s to today. 7-Gender-A3
Arguably, the ratio at NCBS (a little over a third of the faculty are women) is better than many other science institutions across India (with the notable exception of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, where, in 2009, about half the 85 faculty members across the basic sciences were women). See the slideshow below for more.
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But there’s always more room to talk about gender, because biases come in many forms, some that are invisible to half the population. Take a look at Veronica Rodrigues' 1990 note below 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.
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Perhaps the biggest way to make systemic changes is to state the obvious again: have more representation of women across levels of science. Listen to a particular story by Vidita Vaidya, faculty member at TIFR. She starts with how Veronica Rodrigues would push her to publish when she was a new faculty member and needed good academic credentials for future funding. Vaidya then talks about being the only woman at a review in 2003, and the kind of questions she was asked. 7-Gender-A2 For more, see the article excerpt below by Gaiti Hasan, an NCBS faculty member, and hear her audio excerpt comparing today’s climate to when she started her career. 7-Gender-A0
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Perception has a far reaching effect. This chapter will become truly archival in nature when students like Mullick don’t notice the things they do before they hit the job market. The system’s not quite there yet.
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“If you come to NCBS, as soon as you hear them speaking, you know that most of the people are from upper middle class, not from villages,” said Dilawar Singh. “That is the general trend.”
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It’s just something he couldn’t help noticing when he first came to campus. Singh, a current PhD student at NCBS, grew up in Nichalpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh. He started learning English after completing school, and then moved to Chennai to study instrumentation engineering. There, at the library, he came across MN Srinivas’ book, “The Remembered Village”, which led to an interest in sociology. After a stint at IIT Bombay, he moved to NCBS, partly because, like many, he liked how it looked. Listen to his interview clip, where he compares the demographic at different campuses and shares his thoughts on social mobility. 7-Hierarchy-A1
English is the language of instruction, signage and communication at NCBS, and it is the language for mobility. Student potential – as in the case of interviews – is also judged in English. Satyajit Rath, faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII), agrees with Singh’s assessment of campus demographics. In his interview clip, he discusses the role English plays in reinforcing class distinctions at academic institutions like NII and NCBS, and how some sort of affirmative action is necessary to address class diversity. 7-Hierarchy-A2
Bring reservation up in review committees and meetings on campus, and it makes people very uncomfortable, said one faculty member. Nobody wants to go there. There are no reservation policies for faculty hiring or student selection. Permanent staff hiring has to follow a reservation policy. But this is again loosened for scientific and technical staff. Reservation only applies at the lowest level of hiring for this group. Sanjay Sane, a faculty member and former student at NCBS, shares some of his views in his interview. 7-Hierarchy-A3
There is also the question of hierarchy across the staff of NCBS. In the Centre’s early days, the security guards used to salute the senior faculty when they came in through the gates. It was a matter of habit. It’s what they’d been taught to do in their profession. The faculty put a halt to this practice.
In 1989, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a letter to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), assuring him that the new NCBS will hire locally. “We envisage that the bulk of the staff in the lower categories of employees will be from the local population,” he wrote. In an unintended way, the implied hiring mechanism also runs the risk of reinforcing certain hierarchies that are tied to language barriers. Very few faculty members and students speak Kannada. Many members of the support staff may not speak any other language. There are very few signs at NCBS in Kannada. There has been admirable effort to teach Kannada for many years. But it stopped earlier this year due to a combination of poor attendance and purse tightening.
From its start in 1991, NCBS envisioned a lean staff size, and forecast that a lot of the support work would be done by contract agencies. Ranjith, a lab manager at NCBS, narrates a story about hierarchies. He first discusses the disconnect that many staff members might have from the science at NCBS. He then shares his views on how hierarchies form as a result of having a vast pool of temporary staff or people under contract, which comes with its own insecurity. To be temporary, in a sense, is to also work under fear. 7-Hierarchy-A4
That said, there’s also been an effort since the beginning of NCBS to bend toward a more egalitarian culture. New students and staff quickly learn that they are expected to call faculty by their first names. New students remark how it put them off balance at first but it also helped break boundaries very quickly.
Going beyond names though, there’s a less visible class structure; addressing someone by their name does not level the field. Shannon Olsson, faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with her views on wrestling with inherent class structures and figuring out a way to work within and outside of them. 7-Hierarchy-A5
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Pick the vial off the rack, the one with Drosophila and old media. Pick up a new vial with fresh media from another rack, remove the cotton plug off the old vial, invert the old vial into the new one, watch the flies drift in, drop the old vial into its rack, plug the new vial with enough fresh cotton that it makes a proper plug and a little bit sticks out like a chef’s hat but not so much cotton that you are unable to plug the vial, pick up another old vial off the rack….That’s a few seconds. The fly facility technician is in the zone.
Flies have been part of NCBS since it began in 1991, and going all the way back to Obaid Siddiqi’s 1970s work at TIFR and Caltech. Today, NCBS is one of the very few centres in India with a dedicated fly facility. The facility supplies Drosophila lines to various research institutes in India as well as other places around the world. The facility staff performs a variety of tasks. One transfers fly across vials, another aligns Drosophila embryos, yet another injects the embryos as part of the facility’s process of producing transgenic Drosophila. But Deepti Trivedi, a scientist in charge of the fly facility, often wonders what her staff is thinking of when in the flow of fly work. There’s also a language barrier. She doesn’t speak Kannada. Many don’t speak English. In her interview, Trivedi shares some views on talking science with her staff. 7-NCBS Community-A1
Support staff members run NCBS. They clean bathrooms, weed lawns, process an invoice, manage a key bank, drive a shuttle van, serve coffee, order reagents, turn off the lights and yes, transfer flies. Being creative or engaged is not part of the job description. It might sometimes even be an unreasonable expectation. They do necessary work and occasionally work that nobody else wants to do. Sometimes people do what they do because they need the money. That’s the story of a significant proportion of NCBS staff, not just today but across its history.
The 1990-92 NCBS proposal is fairly emphatic about the way the institute would be structured: “What we wish to do was expressed pithily by Abraham Flexner when he proposed the creation of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. Flexner suggested that the Institute \"...should be small, that its staff and students or scholars should be few, that the administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate, that the member of the teaching staff, while freed from the waste of time involved in administrative work, should freely participate in decisions involving the character, quality and direction of its activities.” (Also see the Institution Building – Autonomy Theme).
The slideshow below shows an annexure from a 1996 Project Management Committee meeting. NCBS tries to keep a total of about 60 permanent non-academic staff, expecting that the facilities work will be done by people “on contract to external agencies”. Listen to the audio clip of Shaju Varghese, an administrative officer (services) at NCBS. He discusses his work at TIFR before he moved to NCBS in the early 1990s, the scale of work at NCBS today, and the limitations of a system with very few permanent staff members. 7-NCBS Community-A4 And listen to H Bhagya, member of the cleaning services at NCBS since 2001, as she describes her path to NCBS and interaction with the scientific work. 7-NCBS Community-A2
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In an outreach talk to the NCBS administration in 2009 on olfaction in Drosophila, Obaid Siddiqi started by saying that the scientific career was a self-rewarding one. And he wondered “Is administration – if it is mere service – self rewarding?” Check out the slideshow below for the whole talk. Highlighting the nature of service, this task of engaging the staff, lies on the shoulders of its management. For a while a few years ago, NCBS ran a successful seminar series for the staff where faculty members described their work to a broader audience.
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Every now and then, a unique relation develops between a faculty member and support staff member. In the early 2000s, Sunil Prabhakar joined Obaid Siddiqi's lab as an assistant, offering technical assistance for fly behavior experiments, stock keeping and management of laboratory consumables. He would later continue to do a Masters, and then pursue a PhD. (Hop over to the Sandbox – Space Tour theme to hear Trivedi’s recollections of the bantering between Siddiqi and Prabhakar). Also listen to Sanjay Sane, faculty member at NCBS, talk about the work of M Kemparaju, his long-term lab assistant with an astonishing knowledge of butterflies. To Sane, M Kemparaju is unique and irreplaceable “He’s the person who keeps us employed,” says Sane. And yet, he is relatively unemployable outside NCBS since nobody needs his skill as much as Sane does. 7-NCBS Community-A3
The career growth track for support staff has varied across the history of TIFR and NCBS. Lab assistants going on to do PhDs were not uncommon in TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU). For more on that, head to the Gallery for a couple of contrasting stories from Champakali Ayyub and PN Bhavsar.
Have you seen cells?
Yes, we’ve seen cells, reply the kids. They’re between 13 and 15 years old.
Have you seen real cells?
No, the kids haven’t seen real cells. So, H Krishnamurthy shows them cells in culture under the microscope.
There are some dead cells in this. Can you show me which ones are the dead cells?
And thus, on a Saturday morning, they start out on their first cell biology experiment.
In 1978, Krishnamurthy saw a laser for the first time. He also saw liquid nitrogen that Sunday. At the time, Krishnamurthy was a first year Pre University College (PUC) student in Bangalore. H Narasimahaiah, who had founded the Bangalore Science Forum in 1962, visited his college and announced that he was going to take the students to IISc. Krishnamurthy, who is the head of cytometry and imaging facilities at NCBS, has seen a few lasers since that Sunday. But that first time was special. “I can’t forget the day of seeing the laser and that excitement,” he says.
It’s one of the reasons Krishnamurthy can often be seen around NCBS on weekends with an entourage of students. They challenge him with their questions and ideas, as on that day, when he asked them to identify dead cells. Listen to his interview clip to learn more about how the kids went about solving his problem. 7-Outside-A1
There are perhaps a few broad ways to measure NCBS’ bond to the outside world.
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One is in how its members take their knowledge out and bring the broader community in. A scan of the activities across the campus would give one the sense that outreach is just part of the ethos. Some students teach at local schools, as do faculty members. Some, like Krishnamurthy, host students on campus. The Centre hosts a science journalism workshop every summer. The ecology, evolution and conservation biology researchers engage with the public through NCBS field stations and museum tours (and a Moth Day on campus). This past summer, Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee and Dasaradhi Palakodeti, faculty members at NCBS and InStem, started Perspectivo, “a magazine of the sciences and the humanities”. Visitors on campus tours are a routine sight. An active Research Development Office spearheads much of the effort. There’s an annual Open Day for the public in November. And for more than a decade, the Science and Society program at NCBS has been funding and hosting projects and events that dovetail science and the humanities and explore the history of science. It’s a lot to take in. And it can seem contradictory to the refrain that to be in NCBS is to live in a bubble, perhaps only illustrative of different perceptions. The thing of interest is the ready engagement of the faculty in outreach, especially since it doesn’t necessarily count toward their academic output. But when asked about the seemingly wide array of outreach activities, one faculty member looked bemused. Yes, he replied. It was a natural thing to do. How else should it be?
A second measure is to assess how NCBS community members carry out their work in a way that assimilates with broader societal concerns. One example is the MSc Wildlife Programme. When it started in 2003, it took a slightly different approach to education. This was in the nature of the program, which was outward looking and needed a student body that could engage with issues far beyond the lab. Listen to Ajith Kumar, NCBS faculty member and one of the founders of the programme, talk about where his students come from, where they go, and an eclectic curriculum from genetics to public policy to environmental law while they’re at the Centre. 7-Outside-A4
\nThese bridges to society could be seen as being part of a longer trend in spreading a scientific attitude. Arguably, it started decades ago at TIFR, most notably with the articles and opinion pieces written by BM Udgaonkar, a faculty member at TIFR. Udgaonkar would later go on to found the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. A glance at the list of publications intended at a general audience gives us an understanding of this body of work, especially the 1979-80 work on ‘Scientific Temper and Public Policy’.
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But coupled with these measures of engaging with the outside world is another one: to see how members of the NCBS community get involved with issues beyond the campus. At NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi is often cited as an example of a politically involved academic, especially from his younger days. In the featured video below, the economist, Prabhat Patnaik, summarizes the political involvement of Obaid Siddiqi while in college in the late 1940 and early 1950s.
Many senior members of the faculty themselves grew up in environments where they were tuned into the issues of the time. Listen, for instance, to the views of Upinder Bhalla, faculty member at NCBS. Bhalla grew up in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus with two parents heavily involved in political action, and he reflects on current campus life at NCBS. 7-Outside-A3 Here, the general perception is that students are growing up “apolitical”, as seen in one of the images in the slideshow above. Also hear Debakshi Mullick, a current PhD student at NCBS, for views on what happened at NCBS during the student pay hike protests in 2015. 7-Outside-A5
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Siddiqi did change his views over the years, compared to his student days. In July 1988, Society magazine (yes) published an interview of Obaid Siddiqi (“What's India's No. 1 microbiologist doing with fruit flies?”). The slideshow below has excerpts from that interview, one of the few where he freely shares his reflections on a leftist leaning in college, and the changes he saw in himself over time.
To engage with the outside world is, in a way, a process of introspection, about one’s professional growth, one's role as a member of the society, and the connections in between. In the last session of his 2003 oral history interview, Siddiqi shared his views on value questions in science:
“Well, value questions would always remain in the history [of science], they are the same questions. There are so many kinds of questions – one is the problem of spreading scientific attitude. This was assumed in early years in the Nehru era, the idea was that scientific attitude is a good thing and it will run up science against superstition. That was the accepted policy. Now that seems to have gone and now people have the idea that scientific method will not be the method for changing [attitude to superstitions]. So that question remains. The other value questions – that in science itself – do you have a right to pursue science for science [sake] or is [science] only a means of doing something for the good of others? That is also a value question – [particularly for] science in a poor country....
Human rights is a very strong value question. These questions are seen as trivial and they don’t think too much about this. But on these questions that scientists should speak out because scientists are to a large extent being supported by the government and government money. Scientists have become very timid. And in public they don’t express themselves on government policy. Now that is a value question. Scientists should be able to express their views on social, political [issues]. I think those are much more important things.”
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.
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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.
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.”
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.”
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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
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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
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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.
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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 bistable behaviour, 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
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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 letter 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
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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.
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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: protein(s). 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 “Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”, 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”.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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
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
Stories on hiring faculty, on probing a question for a PhD, on the background to a scientific paper, are all stories that are specific to the history of a research institution. But there are some issues that are pressing in a broader society, and the institution happens to be a microcosm for these issues.
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In the Intersections theme, there are stories around gender equality – the perceptions of students, faculty and staff, past and present. And there are stories around hierarchy, class and the barriers to entry at the Centre. There’s a chapter with views – both historic and current – on interactions between members of the NCBS community. And there’s one on the world beyond the lab and the walls of the Centre. How has NCBS engaged with those outside?
These are complex and layered issues that go far beyond what can be covered here. But what institutional history can do is to repeat things that bear repeating, display some of the lines that divide people, and share some of the ways in which people erase them.
She has a spring in her step when she walks out of home every morning. She plugs in her earphones, gets on the bus to go to NCBS, and walks across campus to Dolna, the NCBS crèche. On this journey, she is in her own world. When she enters the crèche, she is in the world created by the toddlers. She is one of the caretakers at the crèche and she loves it. It’s a new world every time. She watches the toddlers learn to swim and the older ones dig up mud in the garden. There are a few quiet hours in the afternoon when the little ones nap. Come evening, there’s taekwondo, cycling, craft, and snack time. Oh, the food! In the summer, they go on field trips to zoos, museums, and radio stations. And one day, the kids even heard a story on Skype, narrated by a famous storyteller based in the UK. What’s not to like? Evenings are hard, both on the kids and her. The crèche is a dream for the kids and a refuge for her. Home is mundane and devoid of joy, there’s really nobody she can relate to. But at least she’ll be back with the kids tomorrow.
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The NCBS crèche is a model institution for other childcare centres in the city. It has a waiting list. Caretakers say new students with kids factor an available spot in the crèche into their decision making process before joining NCBS.
But it also seems stereotypical to start a section on gender by talking about a woman doing childcare. The only reason is to show how it began and show how it plays into society’s idea of gender roles. The campus did not have a formal child support structure till the late 1990s. This changed after 1998, when R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. What she noticed was that though other faculty members had toddlers, she was the first female faculty member with a child. R Sowdhamini proposed the idea of having a crèche. Listen to her talking about those early days, and the way she’s seen gender roles shape on campus. 7-Gender-A1
Looking after the kids and home is what Arlie Russell Hochschild famously termed the second shift in her 1989 book, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. It’s invisible work. But gender perceptions can also get reinforced without one’s realisation. For instance, at the crèche, the only male employees at the crèche are those who come and teach particular classes. The caretakers during the day are all women. And while it’s what many at the crèche may prefer, it also underlines an old idea of who a caretaker is. For a sense of how it was in an earlier time, listen to Kaleem Siddiqi’s memories of growing up in the TIFR campus in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the way house work was split up at the homes of the TIFR scientists, including his own, the Siddiqi family. 7-Gender-A4 And listen to Debakshi Mullick, current PhD student at NCBS, as she narrates her impressions on gender roles in the biosciences industry from her short experience as an intern recently. 7-Gender-A5
What more can one say about gender inequality in academia than what is widely covered – and in far more depth – in a variety of publications. IndiaBioscience, a non-profit program based out of an office at NCBS, has been instrumental in propping up the conversation on women in science. Still, repetition is useful. In his clip, Vidyanand Nanjundiah, faculty member at TIFR in 1980s, talks about the changes in gender imbalance in science from the 1970s to today. 7-Gender-A3
Arguably, the ratio at NCBS (a little over a third of the faculty are women) is better than many other science institutions across India (with the notable exception of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, where, in 2009, about half the 85 faculty members across the basic sciences were women). See the slideshow below for more.
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But there’s always more room to talk about gender, because biases come in many forms, some that are invisible to half the population. Take a look at Veronica Rodrigues' 1990 note below 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.
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Perhaps the biggest way to make systemic changes is to state the obvious again: have more representation of women across levels of science. Listen to a particular story by Vidita Vaidya, faculty member at TIFR. She starts with how Veronica Rodrigues would push her to publish when she was a new faculty member and needed good academic credentials for future funding. Vaidya then talks about being the only woman at a review in 2003, and the kind of questions she was asked. 7-Gender-A2 For more, see the article excerpt below by Gaiti Hasan, an NCBS faculty member, and hear her audio excerpt comparing today’s climate to when she started her career. 7-Gender-A0
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Perception has a far reaching effect. This chapter will become truly archival in nature when students like Mullick don’t notice the things they do before they hit the job market. The system’s not quite there yet.
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“If you come to NCBS, as soon as you hear them speaking, you know that most of the people are from upper middle class, not from villages,” said Dilawar Singh. “That is the general trend.”
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It’s just something he couldn’t help noticing when he first came to campus. Singh, a current PhD student at NCBS, grew up in Nichalpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh. He started learning English after completing school, and then moved to Chennai to study instrumentation engineering. There, at the library, he came across MN Srinivas’ book, “The Remembered Village”, which led to an interest in sociology. After a stint at IIT Bombay, he moved to NCBS, partly because, like many, he liked how it looked. Listen to his interview clip, where he compares the demographic at different campuses and shares his thoughts on social mobility. 7-Hierarchy-A1
English is the language of instruction, signage and communication at NCBS, and it is the language for mobility. Student potential – as in the case of interviews – is also judged in English. Satyajit Rath, faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII), agrees with Singh’s assessment of campus demographics. In his interview clip, he discusses the role English plays in reinforcing class distinctions at academic institutions like NII and NCBS, and how some sort of affirmative action is necessary to address class diversity. 7-Hierarchy-A2
Bring reservation up in review committees and meetings on campus, and it makes people very uncomfortable, said one faculty member. Nobody wants to go there. There are no reservation policies for faculty hiring or student selection. Permanent staff hiring has to follow a reservation policy. But this is again loosened for scientific and technical staff. Reservation only applies at the lowest level of hiring for this group. Sanjay Sane, a faculty member and former student at NCBS, shares some of his views in his interview. 7-Hierarchy-A3
There is also the question of hierarchy across the staff of NCBS. In the Centre’s early days, the security guards used to salute the senior faculty when they came in through the gates. It was a matter of habit. It’s what they’d been taught to do in their profession. The faculty put a halt to this practice.
In 1989, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a letter to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), assuring him that the new NCBS will hire locally. “We envisage that the bulk of the staff in the lower categories of employees will be from the local population,” he wrote. In an unintended way, the implied hiring mechanism also runs the risk of reinforcing certain hierarchies that are tied to language barriers. Very few faculty members and students speak Kannada. Many members of the support staff may not speak any other language. There are very few signs at NCBS in Kannada. There has been admirable effort to teach Kannada for many years. But it stopped earlier this year due to a combination of poor attendance and purse tightening.
From its start in 1991, NCBS envisioned a lean staff size, and forecast that a lot of the support work would be done by contract agencies. Ranjith, a lab manager at NCBS, narrates a story about hierarchies. He first discusses the disconnect that many staff members might have from the science at NCBS. He then shares his views on how hierarchies form as a result of having a vast pool of temporary staff or people under contract, which comes with its own insecurity. To be temporary, in a sense, is to also work under fear. 7-Hierarchy-A4
That said, there’s also been an effort since the beginning of NCBS to bend toward a more egalitarian culture. New students and staff quickly learn that they are expected to call faculty by their first names. New students remark how it put them off balance at first but it also helped break boundaries very quickly.
Going beyond names though, there’s a less visible class structure; addressing someone by their name does not level the field. Shannon Olsson, faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with her views on wrestling with inherent class structures and figuring out a way to work within and outside of them. 7-Hierarchy-A5
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Pick the vial off the rack, the one with Drosophila and old media. Pick up a new vial with fresh media from another rack, remove the cotton plug off the old vial, invert the old vial into the new one, watch the flies drift in, drop the old vial into its rack, plug the new vial with enough fresh cotton that it makes a proper plug and a little bit sticks out like a chef’s hat but not so much cotton that you are unable to plug the vial, pick up another old vial off the rack….That’s a few seconds. The fly facility technician is in the zone.
Flies have been part of NCBS since it began in 1991, and going all the way back to Obaid Siddiqi’s 1970s work at TIFR and Caltech. Today, NCBS is one of the very few centres in India with a dedicated fly facility. The facility supplies Drosophila lines to various research institutes in India as well as other places around the world. The facility staff performs a variety of tasks. One transfers fly across vials, another aligns Drosophila embryos, yet another injects the embryos as part of the facility’s process of producing transgenic Drosophila. But Deepti Trivedi, a scientist in charge of the fly facility, often wonders what her staff is thinking of when in the flow of fly work. There’s also a language barrier. She doesn’t speak Kannada. Many don’t speak English. In her interview, Trivedi shares some views on talking science with her staff. 7-NCBS Community-A1
Support staff members run NCBS. They clean bathrooms, weed lawns, process an invoice, manage a key bank, drive a shuttle van, serve coffee, order reagents, turn off the lights and yes, transfer flies. Being creative or engaged is not part of the job description. It might sometimes even be an unreasonable expectation. They do necessary work and occasionally work that nobody else wants to do. Sometimes people do what they do because they need the money. That’s the story of a significant proportion of NCBS staff, not just today but across its history.
The 1990-92 NCBS proposal is fairly emphatic about the way the institute would be structured: “What we wish to do was expressed pithily by Abraham Flexner when he proposed the creation of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. Flexner suggested that the Institute \"...should be small, that its staff and students or scholars should be few, that the administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate, that the member of the teaching staff, while freed from the waste of time involved in administrative work, should freely participate in decisions involving the character, quality and direction of its activities.” (Also see the Institution Building – Autonomy Theme).
The slideshow below shows an annexure from a 1996 Project Management Committee meeting. NCBS tries to keep a total of about 60 permanent non-academic staff, expecting that the facilities work will be done by people “on contract to external agencies”. Listen to the audio clip of Shaju Varghese, an administrative officer (services) at NCBS. He discusses his work at TIFR before he moved to NCBS in the early 1990s, the scale of work at NCBS today, and the limitations of a system with very few permanent staff members. 7-NCBS Community-A4 And listen to H Bhagya, member of the cleaning services at NCBS since 2001, as she describes her path to NCBS and interaction with the scientific work. 7-NCBS Community-A2
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In an outreach talk to the NCBS administration in 2009 on olfaction in Drosophila, Obaid Siddiqi started by saying that the scientific career was a self-rewarding one. And he wondered “Is administration – if it is mere service – self rewarding?” Check out the slideshow below for the whole talk. Highlighting the nature of service, this task of engaging the staff, lies on the shoulders of its management. For a while a few years ago, NCBS ran a successful seminar series for the staff where faculty members described their work to a broader audience.
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Every now and then, a unique relation develops between a faculty member and support staff member. In the early 2000s, Sunil Prabhakar joined Obaid Siddiqi's lab as an assistant, offering technical assistance for fly behavior experiments, stock keeping and management of laboratory consumables. He would later continue to do a Masters, and then pursue a PhD. (Hop over to the Sandbox – Space Tour theme to hear Trivedi’s recollections of the bantering between Siddiqi and Prabhakar). Also listen to Sanjay Sane, faculty member at NCBS, talk about the work of M Kemparaju, his long-term lab assistant with an astonishing knowledge of butterflies. To Sane, M Kemparaju is unique and irreplaceable “He’s the person who keeps us employed,” says Sane. And yet, he is relatively unemployable outside NCBS since nobody needs his skill as much as Sane does. 7-NCBS Community-A3
The career growth track for support staff has varied across the history of TIFR and NCBS. Lab assistants going on to do PhDs were not uncommon in TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU). For more on that, head to the Gallery for a couple of contrasting stories from Champakali Ayyub and PN Bhavsar.
Have you seen cells?
Yes, we’ve seen cells, reply the kids. They’re between 13 and 15 years old.
Have you seen real cells?
No, the kids haven’t seen real cells. So, H Krishnamurthy shows them cells in culture under the microscope.
There are some dead cells in this. Can you show me which ones are the dead cells?
And thus, on a Saturday morning, they start out on their first cell biology experiment.
In 1978, Krishnamurthy saw a laser for the first time. He also saw liquid nitrogen that Sunday. At the time, Krishnamurthy was a first year Pre University College (PUC) student in Bangalore. H Narasimahaiah, who had founded the Bangalore Science Forum in 1962, visited his college and announced that he was going to take the students to IISc. Krishnamurthy, who is the head of cytometry and imaging facilities at NCBS, has seen a few lasers since that Sunday. But that first time was special. “I can’t forget the day of seeing the laser and that excitement,” he says.
It’s one of the reasons Krishnamurthy can often be seen around NCBS on weekends with an entourage of students. They challenge him with their questions and ideas, as on that day, when he asked them to identify dead cells. Listen to his interview clip to learn more about how the kids went about solving his problem. 7-Outside-A1
There are perhaps a few broad ways to measure NCBS’ bond to the outside world.
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One is in how its members take their knowledge out and bring the broader community in. A scan of the activities across the campus would give one the sense that outreach is just part of the ethos. Some students teach at local schools, as do faculty members. Some, like Krishnamurthy, host students on campus. The Centre hosts a science journalism workshop every summer. The ecology, evolution and conservation biology researchers engage with the public through NCBS field stations and museum tours (and a Moth Day on campus). This past summer, Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee and Dasaradhi Palakodeti, faculty members at NCBS and InStem, started Perspectivo, “a magazine of the sciences and the humanities”. Visitors on campus tours are a routine sight. An active Research Development Office spearheads much of the effort. There’s an annual Open Day for the public in November. And for more than a decade, the Science and Society program at NCBS has been funding and hosting projects and events that dovetail science and the humanities and explore the history of science. It’s a lot to take in. And it can seem contradictory to the refrain that to be in NCBS is to live in a bubble, perhaps only illustrative of different perceptions. The thing of interest is the ready engagement of the faculty in outreach, especially since it doesn’t necessarily count toward their academic output. But when asked about the seemingly wide array of outreach activities, one faculty member looked bemused. Yes, he replied. It was a natural thing to do. How else should it be?
A second measure is to assess how NCBS community members carry out their work in a way that assimilates with broader societal concerns. One example is the MSc Wildlife Programme. When it started in 2003, it took a slightly different approach to education. This was in the nature of the program, which was outward looking and needed a student body that could engage with issues far beyond the lab. Listen to Ajith Kumar, NCBS faculty member and one of the founders of the programme, talk about where his students come from, where they go, and an eclectic curriculum from genetics to public policy to environmental law while they’re at the Centre. 7-Outside-A4
\nThese bridges to society could be seen as being part of a longer trend in spreading a scientific attitude. Arguably, it started decades ago at TIFR, most notably with the articles and opinion pieces written by BM Udgaonkar, a faculty member at TIFR. Udgaonkar would later go on to found the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. A glance at the list of publications intended at a general audience gives us an understanding of this body of work, especially the 1979-80 work on ‘Scientific Temper and Public Policy’.
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But coupled with these measures of engaging with the outside world is another one: to see how members of the NCBS community get involved with issues beyond the campus. At NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi is often cited as an example of a politically involved academic, especially from his younger days. In the featured video below, the economist, Prabhat Patnaik, summarizes the political involvement of Obaid Siddiqi while in college in the late 1940 and early 1950s.
Many senior members of the faculty themselves grew up in environments where they were tuned into the issues of the time. Listen, for instance, to the views of Upinder Bhalla, faculty member at NCBS. Bhalla grew up in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus with two parents heavily involved in political action, and he reflects on current campus life at NCBS. 7-Outside-A3 Here, the general perception is that students are growing up “apolitical”, as seen in one of the images in the slideshow above. Also hear Debakshi Mullick, a current PhD student at NCBS, for views on what happened at NCBS during the student pay hike protests in 2015. 7-Outside-A5
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Siddiqi did change his views over the years, compared to his student days. In July 1988, Society magazine (yes) published an interview of Obaid Siddiqi (“What's India's No. 1 microbiologist doing with fruit flies?”). The slideshow below has excerpts from that interview, one of the few where he freely shares his reflections on a leftist leaning in college, and the changes he saw in himself over time.
To engage with the outside world is, in a way, a process of introspection, about one’s professional growth, one's role as a member of the society, and the connections in between. In the last session of his 2003 oral history interview, Siddiqi shared his views on value questions in science:
“Well, value questions would always remain in the history [of science], they are the same questions. There are so many kinds of questions – one is the problem of spreading scientific attitude. This was assumed in early years in the Nehru era, the idea was that scientific attitude is a good thing and it will run up science against superstition. That was the accepted policy. Now that seems to have gone and now people have the idea that scientific method will not be the method for changing [attitude to superstitions]. So that question remains. The other value questions – that in science itself – do you have a right to pursue science for science [sake] or is [science] only a means of doing something for the good of others? That is also a value question – [particularly for] science in a poor country....
Human rights is a very strong value question. These questions are seen as trivial and they don’t think too much about this. But on these questions that scientists should speak out because scientists are to a large extent being supported by the government and government money. Scientists have become very timid. And in public they don’t express themselves on government policy. Now that is a value question. Scientists should be able to express their views on social, political [issues]. I think those are much more important things.”
In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”
\nThe history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.
"]],["elementText",{"elementTextId":"3571"},["text","\n\n\"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to.\"
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– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.
Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.
It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. 1-Space-A0
\n1-Space-PS4The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in the late 1970s. And then, later, a National Institute of Immunology and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. 1-Space-A1
\nIn the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.
\n1-Space-V1Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. 1-Space-A3 (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. 1-Space-A2
\n1-Space-P1The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).
\n1-Space-PS2Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.
The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. 1-Space-A4
\n1-Space-PS1For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.
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The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.
But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.
However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. 1-India-A8
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Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on \"Biological Sciences in India\".
The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.
\r\n1-India-PS2At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching \"evidence-based conservation\" in 2003.
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Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala 1-India-A7, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world 1-India-A6, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. 1-India-A5
Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.
Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.
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This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. 1-Recognition-A12 To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. 1-Recognition-A9
Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)
In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.
\n1-Recognition-PS2Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.
\n1-Recognition-P1Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”
\n1-Recognition-V1In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. 1-Recognition-A10 And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. 1-Recognition-A11
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More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.
But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. 1-Reflection-A15
One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. 1-Reflection-A16
Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science 1-Reflection-A13, finding research questions 1-Reflection-A14 and the bridge between biology and society respectively. 1-Reflection-A17
\r\n1-Reflection-PS1These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.
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One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”
In 1944, Homi Bhabha informed A.V. Hill, then Secretary of the Royal Society, that the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust had agreed to sponsor his proposal for a fundamental research institute in physics. Hill replied with a prescient remark. “I think you had better take biophysics under its wing, too,” he said. “I am sure many of the most important future applications of physics will be in biology.”
\nThe history of NCBS is tied to this broader quest for building a name for biological research in India. The Identity theme has four chapters of stories that explore this: from the ways in which people made the case for a separate space for biology, to weighing the pros and cons of doing science in India. Identity is about building a recognizable brand of research. And it is about contemplating on the scientific method itself – picking research questions and probing what distinguishes biology. Reflections on science is a selection of comments from researchers at NCBS and beyond.
"]],["elementText",{"elementTextId":"3571"},["text","\n\n\"We are now entering into an age when scientists begin to function like the high priests of old, who looked after the sacred mysteries; we all bow down to them in reverence and awe, and sometimes, with a little fear, as to what they might be up to.\"
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– Jawaharlal Nehru, TIFR inauguration, 1962.
Nation building in the decades after Indian independence came with this patina of worship. The process included large scale science projects like dams and power plants, schools and universities. And it included new research centres.
It was in this environment, at the time of the Third Five Year Plan (1960-1965), when the government was looking for gaps in the national outlook on science. There was no national space for biology, like, say, the National Physical Laboratory and National Chemical Laboratory. The Third Plan addressed this gap with a mention of a National Biological Laboratory (NBL). To know what came of it, click on the audio slideshow below of MS Swaminathan, who was then at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi. 1-Space-A0
\n1-Space-PS4The NBL never materialized. The idea kept resurfacing through the 1960s and 1970s. What did come up over the years was a Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in the late 1970s. And then, later, a National Institute of Immunology and a National Centre for Biological Sciences. Listen to P Balaram’s unique description of the precursor, NBL, and these institutes that followed. 1-Space-A1
\nIn the extract below from a 2012 TIFR documentary on Homi Bhabha, Obaid Siddiqi talks about the time in the early 1960s of working with Bhabha to make a space for biology in TIFR, including the construction of additional labs in the TIFR building for the new discipline.
\n1-Space-V1Biology was an add-on at the TIFR centre, which was built around physics and mathematics. Over time, it needed more space for its research. Listen to a clip from Siddiqi’s oral history interview where he talks of his interactions with S Ramaseshan, then director of IISc, which then led to the first TIFR-IISc joint centre for biological research. 1-Space-A3 (That, like the NBL, didn’t go far). Also listen to Vidyanand Nanjundiah as he talks of the time he moved from IISc to TIFR in the early 1980s. Nanjundiah worked with Siddiqi to write yet another proposal for a biology centre. This one would eventually become an actual centre. 1-Space-A2
\n1-Space-P1The Planning Commission’s approval for the future NCBS came in July 1985, with the suggestion of setting the biology centre as a National Scheme. Look at the first slideshow to read extracts from the 1980-85 and 1985-90 Plan proposal for the biology centre. (Also see the Identity – Science in India theme for related stories).
\n1-Space-PS2Homi Bhabha would often draw connections between AV Hill’s advice in 1944 to consider biology in the TIFR program, to his hiring of Siddiqi to start molecular biology in 1962. The second slideshow brings out documents that highlight reflections – both at an individual as well as institutional level – on a home for biology. It is pertinent to point out that the Tata Trust’s support for biology preceded even the formation of TIFR, given the commissioning of the Tata Memorial Hospital in 1941.
The proposal for a biology centre was built around an expressed need for separate space. But such a need may also come from having to navigate institutional resistance. This has been a common theme through TIFR’s history. The molecular biology unit faced opposition in 1962, when faculty at Trombay pointed to an already existent biology division there. And a similar counterargument – of duplication of efforts – was heard in the 1980s when it was NCBS’ turn. In his audio excerpt, K VijayRaghavan shares his opinion of that 1980s atmosphere, seeing what he calls an “extraordinary absence of institutional dynamism”. 1-Space-A4
\n1-Space-PS1For more, including 1970s conversations with Siddiqi in TIFR’s West Canteen, step into the Gallery.
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The ducks were all in a row. Or they seemed to be, anyway. Obaid Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah, two members of the molecular biology faculty at TIFR, had written a proposal for a new biology centre outside of the main campus. It was September 1983, part of a book of proposals for TIFR’s 1985-1990 Five Year Plan. BV Sreekantan, then director of TIFR, had approved it. JRD Tata, chair of the TIFR Council, liked the idea, too. The Institute assured the chair of the Atomic Energy Commission that it was okay for the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to support three biology centres – the existing ones at TIFR and Trombay, and in addition, this new centre. Things were good.
But then there was the Planning Commission, which assessed the whole TIFR plan, not just the biology centre. The ambitious plan included a huge radio astronomy project, the Giant Meter Wavelength Radio Telescope. It also requested an expansion of the Balloon Facility at Hyderabad and the TIFR-BARC Pelletron Facility. It sought money for permanent buildings for the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. And it charted out the plan for a Centre for Fundamental Research in Biological Sciences. Summed up, here was an institute with an annual budget of Rs. 8-10 crores, proposing projects that would cost around Rs. 50 crores. It was a trifle hard to swallow.
However, if you take a step back, these projects tell a different story. They point to something bigger than one Institute. This was about building up science in India. Listen to BV Sreekantan recounting this episode to learn how they went about justifying their five-fold budget. 1-India-A8
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Making a case for science in India has been central to the history of TIFR and NCBS. The video and one of the slideshows in this chapter track historical recordings and documents that mull over this, from early TIFR proposals by Homi Bhabha, to SN Bose’s 1961 letter to Siddiqi suggesting places that he could return to in India. Another slideshow moves forward in time. It brings excerpts from a 2009 special report in the Journal of Cell Biology on \"Biological Sciences in India\".
The 1983 biology centre plan envisioned a space that would “specially address itself to the biology of higher organisms”. This would include work on the organisation of genetic information, developmental biology, neurobiology, biochemistry of multi-cellular plants and animals. And in the future, they imagined, even higher level systems – ecology, social behaviour and evolution.
\r\n1-India-PS2At the ecology level, especially, doing science in India becomes more contextualized. The photo of Aditi Pophale at work in the Lakshadweep Archipelago is one example of over 40 field sites for the MSc Wildlife Programme, which started teaching \"evidence-based conservation\" in 2003.
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Listen to Sumantra Chattarji as he discuss how being in India played a role in his 1998 work on chronic stress in the amygdala 1-India-A7, to Shannon Olsson’s decision making process for taking up a faculty position in NCBS rather than any other part of the world 1-India-A6, and to Satyajit Mayor musing on how NCBS could leverage its India setting in future areas of research. 1-India-A5
Want more? Head to the gallery below for more video clips. And check out the Research theme, to see the clinical and agricultural connects.
Here is the thing about being inside Bangalore’s Indian Institute of Science – or Tata Institute as it is commonly called – and setting up a satellite biology centre of Tata Institute – no, the other one in Bombay; and then relocating to an agricultural sciences university known more commonly as jikay-vikay (GKVK). It gets confusing.
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This was the environment that PP Ranjith joined in 1995. He talks about this lack of recognition for NCBS in his audio excerpt. 1-Recognition-A12 To be a recognizable brand, NCBS had to, of course, do decent science. And over time, it started to establish a name for itself. Sumantra Chattarji discusses the process of changing the letterhead and coming up with logo features that symbolized the nature of work at NCBS. 1-Recognition-A9
Names carry meaning. The two slideshows give a glimpse of the evolution of a brand. For instance, in 1988, PK Maitra assured Jayant Udgaonkar that the new biology centre was likely to be a “good place in the coming years”. Between 1990 and 1992, NCBS removed the “fundamental” word from its original name, partly to avoid the awkwardness of two ‘fundamentals’ once TIFR’s name was included. (As it turns out, Homi Bhabha suggested in a 1944 letter that the word ‘fundamental’ should be replaced with ‘advanced’.)
In 1992, NCBS is listed as K VijayRaghavan’s institute affiliation, the first known time in scientific journals. But the NCBS address on papers persisted to be a problem, as seen by the action item at a November 1999 faculty meeting. In parallel, the molecular biology unit at TIFR changed its name to be the Department of Biological Sciences. The name, DBS, reflected a more holistic view of the research at the time, though some did not take to the new name well, with quips of it sounding ‘dubious’.
\n1-Recognition-PS2Names carry meaning. A good “brand” opens doors, and this is true for people, too. Awards and nominations usually come as an after effect of good work. But over time, they, too, become shorthand for one’s work. Robin Holliday alludes to this in the featured 1984 letter to Obaid Siddiqi after Siddiqi was nominated to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. An individual’s nomination process to a scientific society, in itself, can be a way of building the value of both the individual or, as Pontecorvo’s letter to Siddiqi suggests, of the society.
\n1-Recognition-P1Another way to build brands is to hire luminaries into an institute. In the featured video extract from 2012, Utpal Banerjee cautions against this method, discussing the need to instead hire “people who are willing to come here and develop this place as their own.”
\n1-Recognition-V1In the end, the measure of success of NCBS, to paraphrase a comment by K VijayRaghavan, is simple: whether you want to come and work at the Centre, and whether you are valued when you leave. That kind of a brand is sustained by science and the culture in which it is conducted. Satyajit Rath shares his views on the “intellectual benchmarking” that the TIFR/NCBS brands have done in Indian science over the years. 1-Recognition-A10 And Vidyanand Nanjundiah assesses the NCBS culture as being reflective of the TIFR culture in its early days, both in the quality of science and in the risk-taking mentality that an abundance of resources offers. 1-Recognition-A11
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More? See more views – past and present – on name recognition in the gallery.
But that idea is also a case of ignoring some clear distinctions between disciplines, as Obaid Siddiqi remarks in a 2003 oral history session on the scientific method. “The point is that every science has its own characteristics; especially for a working scientist – he learns the characteristic of science, which are his/her trade over a long period of time,” he says. “Some of it is skill, some of it are [sic] ways of thinking and the last part is intuition that he develops without any sort of rule of thumb method.” Listen to the rest of the excerpt where he talks about how the complexity of organisms distinguishes biology. 1-Reflection-A15
One approach to parsing this complexity in biology has been the extensive use of model organisms, with some yearning to develop broader truths. In his audio clip, Sanjay Sane discusses the use of model organisms, and more importantly, the blinders one has on while being confined to a model organism. 1-Reflection-A16
Every now and then, a fleeting phrase sticks in the mind and becomes one to share for generations after. Jacques Monod’s statement at the 1961 Cold Spring Harbour symposia on quantitative biology that “anything found to be true of E. coli must also be true of elephants” is one such example. The featured image and some in the slideshow are a selection of reflections from a variety of researchers within NCBS as well as other historical figures. Also listen to K VijayRaghavan, Gaiti Hasan and Ajith Kumar as they share their longer views in audio excerpts on intuition in science 1-Reflection-A13, finding research questions 1-Reflection-A14 and the bridge between biology and society respectively. 1-Reflection-A17
\r\n1-Reflection-PS1These kinds of thoughts get to the heart of building any new institution. They are reflected in the language of the 1985-90 NCBS proposal document, where the authors imagined the future progress of biology would lie in building on the complexity at each level of life, and finding and making connections at “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It is a view that does not dismiss the interdisciplinary nature of life, as it were, but one that insists that each discipline has a depth waiting to be explored, and that only after building a characteristic outlook within a discipline does one start to see the connections.
\r\n
One of Siddiqi’s long-time collaborators and friends, Martin Heisenberg, wrote a 2012 Journal of Neurogenetics essay that began with an exploration of the differences between biology, physics and chemistry. An excerpt can be seen in the slideshow. “In order to be taken seriously by physicists and chemists, a biologist has to formulate his findings as objective facts,” he wrote. But that is difficult in biology, and experiments may not always have the same results. “To understand why, we have to consider the process of life. There is only one such process on earth. It has been going on without interruption for about 4.5 billion years. From very early on it had the three features of biological evolution: variation, reproduction, and selection. Due to this property — we might call it the Darwinian principle, life on earth is a continuously changing process that allows biological phenomena to appear de novo and others to disappear forever.”
Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.
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At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.
When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. 3-Hiring-A4
It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. 3-Hiring-A5
One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.
NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.
Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.
The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. 3-Hiring-A1 And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. 3-Hiring-A2
The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. 3-Hiring-A3
The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.
Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.
K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). 3-Startup-A3
One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.
Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.
Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. 3-Startup-A2 Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.
Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, “extreme optimism and mild jugaad”.
More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.
MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.
The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. 3-Collab-A1
Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.
The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.
Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. 3-Collab-A3
For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was \"a great deal of collaboration and cooperation\" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4
When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.
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The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?
Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5
The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.
It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. 3-Students-A3
When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. 3-Students-A2 (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).
Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.
NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. 3-Students-A4
Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. 3-Students-A1
SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.
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One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone.
It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.
Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4
Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.
Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. 3-Scaling-A2 And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. 3-Scaling-A3
Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. 3-Scaling-A1
Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”
NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.
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Once you know you have an NCBS, how do you go about finding faculty and staff? How does a new place become an attractive option and what apprehensions do people have before joining? These early steps are crucial in the growth of the place. The chapters in this theme are about understanding Growth at different stages – the history of hiring, students joining an idea more than an institution, figuring out roles in the start-up phase and seeking early collaborations with outside networks.
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At the start, an institution’s reputation comes partly from adventure and its people. There is a point in its lifetime, however, when it becomes a monolith that can pull in more people and resources. As the institute keeps scaling, partly driven by its success, the goals get redefined. Growth, then, is also about shifting goal posts and understanding the lifelong quest for institutes to stay relevant.
When he was doing his Masters at IIT Madras, it struck Jayant Udgaonkar that there was quite a bit of faculty inbreeding -- former students who had become faculty members. He felt it affected the quality of teaching at the institute, and it is something he saw over the years at other places. So, when he became the dean at NCBS, he decided to frame a policy that prevented students of the Centre from being faculty. It did not go down well in the beginning. Listen to Udgaonkar’s audio clip for more. 3-Hiring-A4
It’s a timeless quandary. Any institute, but especially a new one like NCBS was, depends on the people it hires to build it up. At some point in an institute’s life, structures, applications and interviews come into place. But where do those first and second round of hires come from? To state the obvious, networks matter perhaps as much as merit, especially in trying to figure out where to look. These networks are evident for all the founding members and the faculty hires soon after. Serendipity is good, too – listen to R Sowdhamini as she talks about the connection between her PhD defence at IISc in the late 1980s, and her hiring at NCBS in 1998. 3-Hiring-A5
One of the biggest cautionary factors for NCBS in its faculty hires has been to ensure getting those who are just plain good at what they do rather than finding someone to fill a spot in a ‘department’. The same was true for Obaid Siddiqi when he was hired at TIFR in 1962. The slideshow below shows the paper trail behind Obaid Siddiqi’s hiring, and some other hiring decisions in the decades after at TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) and NCBS.
NCBS has maintained a competitive environment and a high bar for research. It has also enforced a tenure system for over a decade. Faculty members are evaluated on their research output after a few years. The process is successful in pushing the bar up. But younger faculty members today express that it also creates an environment where the tenure’s like a cloud hovering on everyone’s mind. One member commented on the perceived vagueness of the process, where the faculty were sometimes not sure what they would be assessed on. “Nobody knows what they’re looking for,” said the current NCBS faculty member. The only known metric was to publish, and publish well. In a sense, it is not different from other tenure-track institutions in the world. And while the process for getting tenure has been around for reasonably long, it’s still not a standard model across India, and it hasn’t had a long enough gestation period at NCBS yet, especially when compared to much older universities across the world.
Regardless of that, research areas have been shaped around the hires. “The place grew as people came along,” said Obaid Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. “Not according to a fixed plan of how it would go. But the plan was that it would be a broad based place and all these areas should be equally strong. This is a great mistake in institutions where people simply begin to get more and more people of their own kind or [according to] what their [own] ideas are.” Listen to this, and other hiring stories in the Gallery (and see the Research – Shifts Theme). Also see TM Sahadevan’s memory of the hand over between Siddiqi and K VijayRaghavan for the director’s position at NCBS in 1998.
The hiring process for support staff is perhaps even more critical since the day to day functioning of the Centre depends on these people. PP Ranjith, who started as an all-jobs person, continues to play that role, and has been running interference between the science and process of getting it done for over two decades. Shaju Varghese was all set to move from his well-set position at TIFR to start a kitchen at the upstart NCBS in 1992. But the 1992 Bombay riots held him back. In his interview excerpt, he reflects on how the riots shaped his outlook. 3-Hiring-A1 And listen to Prem Chandra Gautam, lead of the instrumentation division at NCBS, as he talks about his search for confidence in an individual when he is hiring someone new to his team. 3-Hiring-A2
The career growth path for many in the staff at NCBS is limited. A significant proportion of the work is carried out by temporary staff on one to three-year contracts. H Krishnamurthy, who heads the cytometry and imaging facility, believes strongly in this model. Hear his views on this and on why he forces them to keep educating themselves. 3-Hiring-A3
The staff at NCBS is often praised, by people within the system and outside. One NCBS faculty member felt the campus would basically cease to function if the teams led by Ranjith, Gautam and the reception staff were to disappear. And a new NCBS student exclaimed that she just didn’t understand how systems just seemed to work at NCBS. Who are these people, how do they get hired, she wondered. In a way, her question also points to the largely invisible work of the catering, security and cleaning services. It’s hard to answer her question. Perhaps it lies in some combination of scale, competence and job insecurity for the contract staff. But one way or the other, the bigger challenge is that it sets a precedent and a bar for the system to maintain.
Satyajit Mayor was just not sure about this Bangalore thing. He’d lived outside India for over a decade and, with high profile publications, had a pretty set start to his career in the United States. And his post doctoral gig was in New York. He just had to pick up the phone with a request and the ball would set rolling. The world, in every kaleidoscopic fashion, was at his doorstep, from chemical reagents to Broadway. And then, there was this Bangalore offer.
K VijayRaghavan and Obaid Siddiqi at NCBS had both reached out to him, asking him what he needed to get his research going at Bangalore. A good place to grow cells and a good microscope with an image capturing device, he said. You’ll have the best, said VijayRaghavan. Mayor wasn’t convinced. It was the early 1990s. At TIFR in Bombay perhaps, he thought. But in Bangalore? Listen to the rest of his story where he discusses his start-up days, when he realized he had to “bring the world into my own space”. (Also see Mayor’s December 1994 letter to Siddiqi in the Growth – Hiring theme). 3-Startup-A3
One can draw parallels between VijayRaghavan’s assurance to Mayor and Bhabha’s correspondence with Siddiqi in the 1960s. Even before Siddiqi joined, Bhabha asked him for a list of equipment he would need, and sent out notices to Trombay and the faculty at TIFR to assess what was there and what needed to be bought. Later, soon after Siddiqi joined in 1962, the war between India and China started. Resources were tight. In the midst of that in November 1962, the Registrar of TIFR found a way to start off Siddiqi’s programme because there would be “savings under some heads (electricity, etc)”. Check out these documents in the slideshow below.
Institution building takes a few different kinds of people. There are the ones who imagine the future, as Siddiqi tried to do with the Molecular Biology Unit, and then, NCBS. That imagination has to be coupled with optimism; it is crucial in a system that may not necessarily bend to help. In the featured video clip, Mitradas Panicker shares his memories of the ‘interview’ with Siddiqi at Caltech, the vision he was sold, and the people he met on the ground when he landed in India.
Institution building also needs people to execute a vision, expand it, modify it, and contest it, as did the early faculty at NCBS. Then, someone to help connect with the outside world, like MK Mathew, with his strong ties to IISc. 3-Startup-A2 Some who are going to do any odd job thrown at them, as did N Shanthakumary and KS Vishalakshi when they joined the TIFR Centre in the early to mid 1980s and found themselves learning how to use a scientific typewriter and churning out student theses. 3-Startup-A4 Some who are like glue, and resourceful to find ways around problems, like Prem Chandra Gautam 3-Startup-A1 and PP Ranjith 3-Startup-A5 did at different stages of NCBS’ early life. The featured audio clips give a glimpse into some of these start-up stories, as do many more in the Gallery. The featured photo above and those in the slideshow below show documents and scenes from the NCBS days before it moved to the current campus.
Start-ups are useful to look at since they are often the most interesting and stressful phases of an institution and individual’s career. But the takeaways often repeat themselves in various avatars through an institution’s trajectory. Above all, you need a culture of, as Jayant Udgaonkar said, “extreme optimism and mild jugaad”.
More? Hear L Shashidhara’s story in the Gallery for a perspective on starting out as a post doctoral researcher and getting by with a healthy dose of luck and adventure and a little bit of chutzpah.
MK Mathew’s decision to move from Caltech to Bangalore in the late 1980s was a homecoming of sorts. Bangalore was where he had a stint studying at the IIM and decided management was _not_ what he wanted to do. It was where he had produced plays and made announcements for programmes on All India Radio. And it was where he did his PhD, in P Balaram’s group at IISc. He had a network.
The memorandum of understanding (MoU) between NCBS and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) was more than a rental agreement. It stressed the research collaboration between the two institutes. This collaboration found its beginnings through Mathew’s group. M Udayakumar, a faculty member at UAS, would send students to Mathew, and, in turn, teach the tenants how to work with plants. Listen to Mathew, as he discusses how the two institutes still work together, on understanding the physiology of drought tolerant rice that UAS has bred. It is also perhaps pertinent to point out that their collaboration is an exception to the rule – the number of joint projects today is not indicative of the 1991 promise of a rich collaborative atmosphere. 3-Collab-A1
Collaborations in the form of building international networks have been part of the TIFR model since its inception. In the featured video clip, BV Sreekantan talks about Homi Bhabha bringing in researchers from around the world in the early days of the Institute. International collaborations have sometimes been viewed with suspicion, as seen in the cautionary note from AV Hill at the Royal Society to Bhabha in January 1945, where, toward the end, he asks Bhabha to relay a message to JRD Tata: “People here really do want to help - but don't like being regarded as tricksters”. Examples of such interactions are also shown in the two slideshows.
The Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR got off to a start primarily because of a 40,000-pound grant from the Wellcome Trust in 1963. But molecular biology in TIFR in the early 1960s was a lone ship. Indeed, in 1966, Obaid Siddiqi wrote to MGK Menon during a visit to Yale that “the startling pace at which the field has moved made me feel rather depressed and acutely aware of the slowness of our endeavours”. (See the Ripple Effects theme for more on this). The group would continue to invite known researchers in the field, like Frank Stahl’s phage workshop at TIFR in the late 1960s. The Mahabaleshwar Seminars, which were started in 1975 by Siddiqi and John Barnabas, were instrumental in bringing together researchers and students. (At NCBS today, interestingly, it is the students of the theory group who have been instrumental in bringing together some collaboration and cross-talk). The MBU faculty would also reach out the broader scientific community, notably in the case of Siddiqi’s neurobiology collaborations with Seymour Benzer at Caltech.
Around 2000, NCBS sent its annual report to various companies, seeking support for its research programmes. Reliance Industries expressed interest in collaborating by investing in biotechnology and bio-informatics tools. Meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow give a sense of the diverse views in the faculty at the time. Mitradas Panicker’s interview excerpt also highlights a particular interesting time in early human embryonic stem cell research, when NCBS collaborated with a fertility clinic in Bombay in the late 1990s. 3-Collab-A3
For any new institute or discipline, there is a fine balance between heavy collaboration and building an independent identity. In the early 1990s, after the formation of NCBS, it had its own separate section (besides the MBU) in the TIFR annual reports. The opening paragraph over those few years would take pains to stress that there was \"a great deal of collaboration and cooperation\" between the two groups. Also listen to CNR Rao’s reflection on the interaction between IISc and NCBS when it started at the TIFR Centre in the early 1990s. 3-Collab-A2 And to Dasaradhi Palakodeti’s views on the current conversation between NCBS and InStem, two institutes adjacent to each other. 3-Collab-A4
When researchers of different institutes and disciplines work adjacent to each other, it is natural to expect some cross-pollination. There was much promise of this synergistic environment between the physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics scientists at TIFR over the years. But it hasn’t happened to the extent that people have wanted. That perhaps has been one of the biggest losses, a big what-could-have-been. Listen to K VijayRaghavan on this 3-Collab-A5 and head to the Gallery to listen to the views of MS Raghunathan and Shobhona Sharma for more.
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The reason Debakshi Mullick didn’t go to check the results after she appeared for the NCBS interviews was that she knew she’d failed miserably. Her interviews were shorter than everyone else’s interviews. And whatever she said didn’t seem to satisfy her panel. “Whatever I answered, they had a counter answer to it,” she said. And so, she felt, alright, okay, I know nothing. What was the point in checking the result? And then there was that question that Axel Brockmann asked her, of a negative relation between a plant and an animal. What was she thinking?
Mullick is a current PhD student at NCBS. In her interview excerpt, she looks back at that time a few years back. 3-Students-A5
The interview process for students at NCBS and TIFR has built quite a reputation for itself. It carries quite a bit of weight in the decision making. Its history goes back a few decades at least, to the point where current faculty at TIFR can see similarities between their interview when they were a student to those they conduct today. Go to the Gallery to hear Krishanu Ray’s recollections of his interview. The interview questions come in all shapes and sizes, as evident in Jagdish Krishnaswamy’s recounting of a KS Krishnan question in the featured video. And over the years, some places, one faculty member said, have figured out how to game the NCBS system. Especially those Delhi University folks, he added.
It wasn’t always quite so structured. In 1975, Veronica Rodrigues, a college student in Dublin, Ireland, was impressed by the elegance of a paper she read on bacterial recombination. So, she reached out to Vijay Sarathy, the lead author, thinking he was the principal investigator. Sarathy passed it on to Obaid Siddiqi, the second author and principal investigator. Siddiqi replied back to her. Later, Rodrigues sent a request to Siddiqi asking to join him for a PhD. And that was that. See the slideshow for a copy of this letter. Also listen to the views of Aditi Bhattacharya, who joined NCBS in the early 2000s, and came from a college system with no background in research or in reading scientific journal articles. 3-Students-A3
When it started, NCBS wouldn’t get many applicants. Sure, there was the TIFR name, but there were far more established places in Bangalore. K VijayRaghavan thinks back to that time in his interview excerpt, stressing that one of the few things NCBS had going for itself in those early days, besides the TIFR name, was a sense of enthusiasm in the faculty. 3-Students-A2 (The MSc Wildlife Programme today has echoes of this. The number of applicants is still relatively small, and the programme attracts many who leave lucrative careers to jump into conservation. The faculty see that and also point out a passion they see in their students that they don’t normally see in other parts of the campus).
Ritu Khurana (now Bhavana Shivu), NCBS’ first graduate student, was the first person from Jayant Udgaonkar’s group to move from Bombay to Bangalore. She would use the facilities in the Molecular Biophysics Unit at IISc. Later, when NCBS acquired a fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC) system, she and other students would play host to IISc students. The NCBS experience was unusual in hindsight, she said by email. She was never taught subordination, and never hesitated in picking up intellectual arguments with professors, regardless of their stature. The egalitarian experience sticks out, she said, especially in light of work later in her career.
NCBS is an established brand today. The reasons to come to the campus are many, and the students have diverse backgrounds. For instance, Anubhab Khan, a current PhD student, makes water desalination plants as a hobby. And in his interview clip, Khan quips that he was drawn to NCBS initially not by its research, but by the food and landscaping. It’s a fair point, too, especially when one can choose. 3-Students-A4
Due to a combination of interest in biotechnology and the reputation of the Centre, NCBS gets up to 10,000 applications some years. But the number of students NCBS takes is still a handful, to a point where the acceptance ratio at NCBS can be less than one percent in those years. Students reflect the zeitgeist of the system, one that is accentuated by the wide interest in biotechnology. That creates a large background of students who hop along the requirements of the system to clear the competitive exam hurdles. The faculty are on the lookout for a small set of students who are really interested in the research process. Listen to Mukund Thattai’s reflection on what he calls the signal to noise problem for faculty at places like NCBS. 3-Students-A1
SN Basha’s family used to be in the moti business in Bijapur in north Karnataka in the 1970s. It was a decent life. Then, in 1975, the Emergency changed their business fortunes and he found himself in Bangalore in search of a job. He joined the New Government Electrical Factory (NGEF). And when that shut down in 2002, he was again on the lookout, for anything.
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One of Basha’s acquaintances who worked as a security guard at NCBS told him about the place and brought him along. It’s been his job since then to keep an eye on people going in and out of campus. It was a small place back then, NCBS. Kind of in the middle of nowhere. But everyone knew everyone.
It's much bigger today. He has to ask for identification when someone enters the campus. And it’s been hard to keep up with every single person’s face. It’s unrealistic. And sometimes people just don’t get that.
Scaling affects everyone. Listen to Basha’s views on how it affects his work. 3-Scaling-A4
Institutions tend to grow, in square feet, intellectual merit, and political heft. What happens in the process is the thing of interest. Around its 10-year anniversary, NCBS conducted an external review of the Centre, taking into consideration the way it was going to scale. In the featured audio slideshow are some of the documents shared with a review committee. Also hear an excerpt from a recent interview with K VijayRaghavan, faculty member at NCBS, on lien with the Government of India, where he serves as the Secretary to the Department of Biotechnology.
Talk on scaling is like a background hum at NCBS today. You hear it everywhere and from everyone, students, faculty and staff. NCBS is too big, it’s not big enough, it has to grow, why should it grow, I don’t know anyone, why does that matter. The Gallery offers opinions from a variety of current community members on the issue. In his interview, Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member and current director of NCBS, gives his take on scale, asserting the Centre is in a sweet spot, having space to expand its research when needed. 3-Scaling-A2 And in the featured audio clip, Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS, shares his concern on the future of the NCBS funding structure and the future of students at the institute. 3-Scaling-A3
Five years after the founding of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a note on the academic and administrative structure of the Centre. These notes, and other historical documents around scale, are in the slideshow below. Siddiqi made the case for giving the Centre more structure through management boards and advisory committees, instead of decisions through ad hoc meetings. One of the guiding principles at NCBS has been to keep a small number of permanent administrative staff and run the system with the additional help of temporary staff and contracting agencies. In his interview excerpt, Ashok Rao, an administrative officer at NCBS, shares his concerns on the administrative gaps that he sees in the system today. 3-Scaling-A1
Perhaps at the heart of all the angst at NCBS is the question of cultural changes as the institution grows. But institutional culture is an ethereal beast, a slipshod composite of ideas, processes and people. As Mary Douglas says in her 1986 book, How Institutions Think, “Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each other's ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent.”
NCBS has led an unlikely and remarkable 25-year journey. But still, it is 25, a mite-sized number in a chart of institutional ages. Only when the institution outlives its founders, when new generations keep imbuing the place with their vision, work, dissent, and anxiety, might one be able to measure its relevance.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.”
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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
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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
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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.
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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 bistable behaviour, 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
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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 letter 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
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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.
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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: protein(s). 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 “Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”, 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”.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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
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
Stories on hiring faculty, on probing a question for a PhD, on the background to a scientific paper, are all stories that are specific to the history of a research institution. But there are some issues that are pressing in a broader society, and the institution happens to be a microcosm for these issues.
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In the Intersections theme, there are stories around gender equality – the perceptions of students, faculty and staff, past and present. And there are stories around hierarchy, class and the barriers to entry at the Centre. There’s a chapter with views – both historic and current – on interactions between members of the NCBS community. And there’s one on the world beyond the lab and the walls of the Centre. How has NCBS engaged with those outside?
These are complex and layered issues that go far beyond what can be covered here. But what institutional history can do is to repeat things that bear repeating, display some of the lines that divide people, and share some of the ways in which people erase them.
She has a spring in her step when she walks out of home every morning. She plugs in her earphones, gets on the bus to go to NCBS, and walks across campus to Dolna, the NCBS crèche. On this journey, she is in her own world. When she enters the crèche, she is in the world created by the toddlers. She is one of the caretakers at the crèche and she loves it. It’s a new world every time. She watches the toddlers learn to swim and the older ones dig up mud in the garden. There are a few quiet hours in the afternoon when the little ones nap. Come evening, there’s taekwondo, cycling, craft, and snack time. Oh, the food! In the summer, they go on field trips to zoos, museums, and radio stations. And one day, the kids even heard a story on Skype, narrated by a famous storyteller based in the UK. What’s not to like? Evenings are hard, both on the kids and her. The crèche is a dream for the kids and a refuge for her. Home is mundane and devoid of joy, there’s really nobody she can relate to. But at least she’ll be back with the kids tomorrow.
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The NCBS crèche is a model institution for other childcare centres in the city. It has a waiting list. Caretakers say new students with kids factor an available spot in the crèche into their decision making process before joining NCBS.
But it also seems stereotypical to start a section on gender by talking about a woman doing childcare. The only reason is to show how it began and show how it plays into society’s idea of gender roles. The campus did not have a formal child support structure till the late 1990s. This changed after 1998, when R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. What she noticed was that though other faculty members had toddlers, she was the first female faculty member with a child. R Sowdhamini proposed the idea of having a crèche. Listen to her talking about those early days, and the way she’s seen gender roles shape on campus. 7-Gender-A1
Looking after the kids and home is what Arlie Russell Hochschild famously termed the second shift in her 1989 book, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. It’s invisible work. But gender perceptions can also get reinforced without one’s realisation. For instance, at the crèche, the only male employees at the crèche are those who come and teach particular classes. The caretakers during the day are all women. And while it’s what many at the crèche may prefer, it also underlines an old idea of who a caretaker is. For a sense of how it was in an earlier time, listen to Kaleem Siddiqi’s memories of growing up in the TIFR campus in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the way house work was split up at the homes of the TIFR scientists, including his own, the Siddiqi family. 7-Gender-A4 And listen to Debakshi Mullick, current PhD student at NCBS, as she narrates her impressions on gender roles in the biosciences industry from her short experience as an intern recently. 7-Gender-A5
What more can one say about gender inequality in academia than what is widely covered – and in far more depth – in a variety of publications. IndiaBioscience, a non-profit program based out of an office at NCBS, has been instrumental in propping up the conversation on women in science. Still, repetition is useful. In his clip, Vidyanand Nanjundiah, faculty member at TIFR in 1980s, talks about the changes in gender imbalance in science from the 1970s to today. 7-Gender-A3
Arguably, the ratio at NCBS (a little over a third of the faculty are women) is better than many other science institutions across India (with the notable exception of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, where, in 2009, about half the 85 faculty members across the basic sciences were women). See the slideshow below for more.
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But there’s always more room to talk about gender, because biases come in many forms, some that are invisible to half the population. Take a look at Veronica Rodrigues' 1990 note below 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.
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Perhaps the biggest way to make systemic changes is to state the obvious again: have more representation of women across levels of science. Listen to a particular story by Vidita Vaidya, faculty member at TIFR. She starts with how Veronica Rodrigues would push her to publish when she was a new faculty member and needed good academic credentials for future funding. Vaidya then talks about being the only woman at a review in 2003, and the kind of questions she was asked. 7-Gender-A2 For more, see the article excerpt below by Gaiti Hasan, an NCBS faculty member, and hear her audio excerpt comparing today’s climate to when she started her career. 7-Gender-A0
7-Gender-PS4
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Perception has a far reaching effect. This chapter will become truly archival in nature when students like Mullick don’t notice the things they do before they hit the job market. The system’s not quite there yet.
"]],["elementText",{"elementTextId":"3610"},["text","
“If you come to NCBS, as soon as you hear them speaking, you know that most of the people are from upper middle class, not from villages,” said Dilawar Singh. “That is the general trend.”
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It’s just something he couldn’t help noticing when he first came to campus. Singh, a current PhD student at NCBS, grew up in Nichalpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh. He started learning English after completing school, and then moved to Chennai to study instrumentation engineering. There, at the library, he came across MN Srinivas’ book, “The Remembered Village”, which led to an interest in sociology. After a stint at IIT Bombay, he moved to NCBS, partly because, like many, he liked how it looked. Listen to his interview clip, where he compares the demographic at different campuses and shares his thoughts on social mobility. 7-Hierarchy-A1
English is the language of instruction, signage and communication at NCBS, and it is the language for mobility. Student potential – as in the case of interviews – is also judged in English. Satyajit Rath, faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII), agrees with Singh’s assessment of campus demographics. In his interview clip, he discusses the role English plays in reinforcing class distinctions at academic institutions like NII and NCBS, and how some sort of affirmative action is necessary to address class diversity. 7-Hierarchy-A2
Bring reservation up in review committees and meetings on campus, and it makes people very uncomfortable, said one faculty member. Nobody wants to go there. There are no reservation policies for faculty hiring or student selection. Permanent staff hiring has to follow a reservation policy. But this is again loosened for scientific and technical staff. Reservation only applies at the lowest level of hiring for this group. Sanjay Sane, a faculty member and former student at NCBS, shares some of his views in his interview. 7-Hierarchy-A3
There is also the question of hierarchy across the staff of NCBS. In the Centre’s early days, the security guards used to salute the senior faculty when they came in through the gates. It was a matter of habit. It’s what they’d been taught to do in their profession. The faculty put a halt to this practice.
In 1989, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a letter to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), assuring him that the new NCBS will hire locally. “We envisage that the bulk of the staff in the lower categories of employees will be from the local population,” he wrote. In an unintended way, the implied hiring mechanism also runs the risk of reinforcing certain hierarchies that are tied to language barriers. Very few faculty members and students speak Kannada. Many members of the support staff may not speak any other language. There are very few signs at NCBS in Kannada. There has been admirable effort to teach Kannada for many years. But it stopped earlier this year due to a combination of poor attendance and purse tightening.
From its start in 1991, NCBS envisioned a lean staff size, and forecast that a lot of the support work would be done by contract agencies. Ranjith, a lab manager at NCBS, narrates a story about hierarchies. He first discusses the disconnect that many staff members might have from the science at NCBS. He then shares his views on how hierarchies form as a result of having a vast pool of temporary staff or people under contract, which comes with its own insecurity. To be temporary, in a sense, is to also work under fear. 7-Hierarchy-A4
That said, there’s also been an effort since the beginning of NCBS to bend toward a more egalitarian culture. New students and staff quickly learn that they are expected to call faculty by their first names. New students remark how it put them off balance at first but it also helped break boundaries very quickly.
Going beyond names though, there’s a less visible class structure; addressing someone by their name does not level the field. Shannon Olsson, faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with her views on wrestling with inherent class structures and figuring out a way to work within and outside of them. 7-Hierarchy-A5
7-NCBS-P1
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Pick the vial off the rack, the one with Drosophila and old media. Pick up a new vial with fresh media from another rack, remove the cotton plug off the old vial, invert the old vial into the new one, watch the flies drift in, drop the old vial into its rack, plug the new vial with enough fresh cotton that it makes a proper plug and a little bit sticks out like a chef’s hat but not so much cotton that you are unable to plug the vial, pick up another old vial off the rack….That’s a few seconds. The fly facility technician is in the zone.
Flies have been part of NCBS since it began in 1991, and going all the way back to Obaid Siddiqi’s 1970s work at TIFR and Caltech. Today, NCBS is one of the very few centres in India with a dedicated fly facility. The facility supplies Drosophila lines to various research institutes in India as well as other places around the world. The facility staff performs a variety of tasks. One transfers fly across vials, another aligns Drosophila embryos, yet another injects the embryos as part of the facility’s process of producing transgenic Drosophila. But Deepti Trivedi, a scientist in charge of the fly facility, often wonders what her staff is thinking of when in the flow of fly work. There’s also a language barrier. She doesn’t speak Kannada. Many don’t speak English. In her interview, Trivedi shares some views on talking science with her staff. 7-NCBS Community-A1
Support staff members run NCBS. They clean bathrooms, weed lawns, process an invoice, manage a key bank, drive a shuttle van, serve coffee, order reagents, turn off the lights and yes, transfer flies. Being creative or engaged is not part of the job description. It might sometimes even be an unreasonable expectation. They do necessary work and occasionally work that nobody else wants to do. Sometimes people do what they do because they need the money. That’s the story of a significant proportion of NCBS staff, not just today but across its history.
The 1990-92 NCBS proposal is fairly emphatic about the way the institute would be structured: “What we wish to do was expressed pithily by Abraham Flexner when he proposed the creation of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. Flexner suggested that the Institute \"...should be small, that its staff and students or scholars should be few, that the administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate, that the member of the teaching staff, while freed from the waste of time involved in administrative work, should freely participate in decisions involving the character, quality and direction of its activities.” (Also see the Institution Building – Autonomy Theme).
The slideshow below shows an annexure from a 1996 Project Management Committee meeting. NCBS tries to keep a total of about 60 permanent non-academic staff, expecting that the facilities work will be done by people “on contract to external agencies”. Listen to the audio clip of Shaju Varghese, an administrative officer (services) at NCBS. He discusses his work at TIFR before he moved to NCBS in the early 1990s, the scale of work at NCBS today, and the limitations of a system with very few permanent staff members. 7-NCBS Community-A4 And listen to H Bhagya, member of the cleaning services at NCBS since 2001, as she describes her path to NCBS and interaction with the scientific work. 7-NCBS Community-A2
7-NCBS-PS1
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In an outreach talk to the NCBS administration in 2009 on olfaction in Drosophila, Obaid Siddiqi started by saying that the scientific career was a self-rewarding one. And he wondered “Is administration – if it is mere service – self rewarding?” Check out the slideshow below for the whole talk. Highlighting the nature of service, this task of engaging the staff, lies on the shoulders of its management. For a while a few years ago, NCBS ran a successful seminar series for the staff where faculty members described their work to a broader audience.
7-NCBS-PS2
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Every now and then, a unique relation develops between a faculty member and support staff member. In the early 2000s, Sunil Prabhakar joined Obaid Siddiqi's lab as an assistant, offering technical assistance for fly behavior experiments, stock keeping and management of laboratory consumables. He would later continue to do a Masters, and then pursue a PhD. (Hop over to the Sandbox – Space Tour theme to hear Trivedi’s recollections of the bantering between Siddiqi and Prabhakar). Also listen to Sanjay Sane, faculty member at NCBS, talk about the work of M Kemparaju, his long-term lab assistant with an astonishing knowledge of butterflies. To Sane, M Kemparaju is unique and irreplaceable “He’s the person who keeps us employed,” says Sane. And yet, he is relatively unemployable outside NCBS since nobody needs his skill as much as Sane does. 7-NCBS Community-A3
The career growth track for support staff has varied across the history of TIFR and NCBS. Lab assistants going on to do PhDs were not uncommon in TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU). For more on that, head to the Gallery for a couple of contrasting stories from Champakali Ayyub and PN Bhavsar.
Have you seen cells?
Yes, we’ve seen cells, reply the kids. They’re between 13 and 15 years old.
Have you seen real cells?
No, the kids haven’t seen real cells. So, H Krishnamurthy shows them cells in culture under the microscope.
There are some dead cells in this. Can you show me which ones are the dead cells?
And thus, on a Saturday morning, they start out on their first cell biology experiment.
In 1978, Krishnamurthy saw a laser for the first time. He also saw liquid nitrogen that Sunday. At the time, Krishnamurthy was a first year Pre University College (PUC) student in Bangalore. H Narasimahaiah, who had founded the Bangalore Science Forum in 1962, visited his college and announced that he was going to take the students to IISc. Krishnamurthy, who is the head of cytometry and imaging facilities at NCBS, has seen a few lasers since that Sunday. But that first time was special. “I can’t forget the day of seeing the laser and that excitement,” he says.
It’s one of the reasons Krishnamurthy can often be seen around NCBS on weekends with an entourage of students. They challenge him with their questions and ideas, as on that day, when he asked them to identify dead cells. Listen to his interview clip to learn more about how the kids went about solving his problem. 7-Outside-A1
There are perhaps a few broad ways to measure NCBS’ bond to the outside world.
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One is in how its members take their knowledge out and bring the broader community in. A scan of the activities across the campus would give one the sense that outreach is just part of the ethos. Some students teach at local schools, as do faculty members. Some, like Krishnamurthy, host students on campus. The Centre hosts a science journalism workshop every summer. The ecology, evolution and conservation biology researchers engage with the public through NCBS field stations and museum tours (and a Moth Day on campus). This past summer, Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee and Dasaradhi Palakodeti, faculty members at NCBS and InStem, started Perspectivo, “a magazine of the sciences and the humanities”. Visitors on campus tours are a routine sight. An active Research Development Office spearheads much of the effort. There’s an annual Open Day for the public in November. And for more than a decade, the Science and Society program at NCBS has been funding and hosting projects and events that dovetail science and the humanities and explore the history of science. It’s a lot to take in. And it can seem contradictory to the refrain that to be in NCBS is to live in a bubble, perhaps only illustrative of different perceptions. The thing of interest is the ready engagement of the faculty in outreach, especially since it doesn’t necessarily count toward their academic output. But when asked about the seemingly wide array of outreach activities, one faculty member looked bemused. Yes, he replied. It was a natural thing to do. How else should it be?
A second measure is to assess how NCBS community members carry out their work in a way that assimilates with broader societal concerns. One example is the MSc Wildlife Programme. When it started in 2003, it took a slightly different approach to education. This was in the nature of the program, which was outward looking and needed a student body that could engage with issues far beyond the lab. Listen to Ajith Kumar, NCBS faculty member and one of the founders of the programme, talk about where his students come from, where they go, and an eclectic curriculum from genetics to public policy to environmental law while they’re at the Centre. 7-Outside-A4
\nThese bridges to society could be seen as being part of a longer trend in spreading a scientific attitude. Arguably, it started decades ago at TIFR, most notably with the articles and opinion pieces written by BM Udgaonkar, a faculty member at TIFR. Udgaonkar would later go on to found the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. A glance at the list of publications intended at a general audience gives us an understanding of this body of work, especially the 1979-80 work on ‘Scientific Temper and Public Policy’.
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But coupled with these measures of engaging with the outside world is another one: to see how members of the NCBS community get involved with issues beyond the campus. At NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi is often cited as an example of a politically involved academic, especially from his younger days. In the featured video below, the economist, Prabhat Patnaik, summarizes the political involvement of Obaid Siddiqi while in college in the late 1940 and early 1950s.
Many senior members of the faculty themselves grew up in environments where they were tuned into the issues of the time. Listen, for instance, to the views of Upinder Bhalla, faculty member at NCBS. Bhalla grew up in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus with two parents heavily involved in political action, and he reflects on current campus life at NCBS. 7-Outside-A3 Here, the general perception is that students are growing up “apolitical”, as seen in one of the images in the slideshow above. Also hear Debakshi Mullick, a current PhD student at NCBS, for views on what happened at NCBS during the student pay hike protests in 2015. 7-Outside-A5
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Siddiqi did change his views over the years, compared to his student days. In July 1988, Society magazine (yes) published an interview of Obaid Siddiqi (“What's India's No. 1 microbiologist doing with fruit flies?”). The slideshow below has excerpts from that interview, one of the few where he freely shares his reflections on a leftist leaning in college, and the changes he saw in himself over time.
To engage with the outside world is, in a way, a process of introspection, about one’s professional growth, one's role as a member of the society, and the connections in between. In the last session of his 2003 oral history interview, Siddiqi shared his views on value questions in science:
“Well, value questions would always remain in the history [of science], they are the same questions. There are so many kinds of questions – one is the problem of spreading scientific attitude. This was assumed in early years in the Nehru era, the idea was that scientific attitude is a good thing and it will run up science against superstition. That was the accepted policy. Now that seems to have gone and now people have the idea that scientific method will not be the method for changing [attitude to superstitions]. So that question remains. The other value questions – that in science itself – do you have a right to pursue science for science [sake] or is [science] only a means of doing something for the good of others? That is also a value question – [particularly for] science in a poor country....
Human rights is a very strong value question. These questions are seen as trivial and they don’t think too much about this. But on these questions that scientists should speak out because scientists are to a large extent being supported by the government and government money. Scientists have become very timid. And in public they don’t express themselves on government policy. Now that is a value question. Scientists should be able to express their views on social, political [issues]. I think those are much more important things.”
Stories on hiring faculty, on probing a question for a PhD, on the background to a scientific paper, are all stories that are specific to the history of a research institution. But there are some issues that are pressing in a broader society, and the institution happens to be a microcosm for these issues.
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In the Intersections theme, there are stories around gender equality – the perceptions of students, faculty and staff, past and present. And there are stories around hierarchy, class and the barriers to entry at the Centre. There’s a chapter with views – both historic and current – on interactions between members of the NCBS community. And there’s one on the world beyond the lab and the walls of the Centre. How has NCBS engaged with those outside?
These are complex and layered issues that go far beyond what can be covered here. But what institutional history can do is to repeat things that bear repeating, display some of the lines that divide people, and share some of the ways in which people erase them.
She has a spring in her step when she walks out of home every morning. She plugs in her earphones, gets on the bus to go to NCBS, and walks across campus to Dolna, the NCBS crèche. On this journey, she is in her own world. When she enters the crèche, she is in the world created by the toddlers. She is one of the caretakers at the crèche and she loves it. It’s a new world every time. She watches the toddlers learn to swim and the older ones dig up mud in the garden. There are a few quiet hours in the afternoon when the little ones nap. Come evening, there’s taekwondo, cycling, craft, and snack time. Oh, the food! In the summer, they go on field trips to zoos, museums, and radio stations. And one day, the kids even heard a story on Skype, narrated by a famous storyteller based in the UK. What’s not to like? Evenings are hard, both on the kids and her. The crèche is a dream for the kids and a refuge for her. Home is mundane and devoid of joy, there’s really nobody she can relate to. But at least she’ll be back with the kids tomorrow.
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The NCBS crèche is a model institution for other childcare centres in the city. It has a waiting list. Caretakers say new students with kids factor an available spot in the crèche into their decision making process before joining NCBS.
But it also seems stereotypical to start a section on gender by talking about a woman doing childcare. The only reason is to show how it began and show how it plays into society’s idea of gender roles. The campus did not have a formal child support structure till the late 1990s. This changed after 1998, when R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. What she noticed was that though other faculty members had toddlers, she was the first female faculty member with a child. R Sowdhamini proposed the idea of having a crèche. Listen to her talking about those early days, and the way she’s seen gender roles shape on campus. 7-Gender-A1
Looking after the kids and home is what Arlie Russell Hochschild famously termed the second shift in her 1989 book, The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home. It’s invisible work. But gender perceptions can also get reinforced without one’s realisation. For instance, at the crèche, the only male employees at the crèche are those who come and teach particular classes. The caretakers during the day are all women. And while it’s what many at the crèche may prefer, it also underlines an old idea of who a caretaker is. For a sense of how it was in an earlier time, listen to Kaleem Siddiqi’s memories of growing up in the TIFR campus in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the way house work was split up at the homes of the TIFR scientists, including his own, the Siddiqi family. 7-Gender-A4 And listen to Debakshi Mullick, current PhD student at NCBS, as she narrates her impressions on gender roles in the biosciences industry from her short experience as an intern recently. 7-Gender-A5
What more can one say about gender inequality in academia than what is widely covered – and in far more depth – in a variety of publications. IndiaBioscience, a non-profit program based out of an office at NCBS, has been instrumental in propping up the conversation on women in science. Still, repetition is useful. In his clip, Vidyanand Nanjundiah, faculty member at TIFR in 1980s, talks about the changes in gender imbalance in science from the 1970s to today. 7-Gender-A3
Arguably, the ratio at NCBS (a little over a third of the faculty are women) is better than many other science institutions across India (with the notable exception of the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, where, in 2009, about half the 85 faculty members across the basic sciences were women). See the slideshow below for more.
7-Gender-PS2
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But there’s always more room to talk about gender, because biases come in many forms, some that are invisible to half the population. Take a look at Veronica Rodrigues' 1990 note below 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.
7-Gender-PS1
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Perhaps the biggest way to make systemic changes is to state the obvious again: have more representation of women across levels of science. Listen to a particular story by Vidita Vaidya, faculty member at TIFR. She starts with how Veronica Rodrigues would push her to publish when she was a new faculty member and needed good academic credentials for future funding. Vaidya then talks about being the only woman at a review in 2003, and the kind of questions she was asked. 7-Gender-A2 For more, see the article excerpt below by Gaiti Hasan, an NCBS faculty member, and hear her audio excerpt comparing today’s climate to when she started her career. 7-Gender-A0
7-Gender-PS4
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Perception has a far reaching effect. This chapter will become truly archival in nature when students like Mullick don’t notice the things they do before they hit the job market. The system’s not quite there yet.
"]],["elementText",{"elementTextId":"3610"},["text","
“If you come to NCBS, as soon as you hear them speaking, you know that most of the people are from upper middle class, not from villages,” said Dilawar Singh. “That is the general trend.”
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It’s just something he couldn’t help noticing when he first came to campus. Singh, a current PhD student at NCBS, grew up in Nichalpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh. He started learning English after completing school, and then moved to Chennai to study instrumentation engineering. There, at the library, he came across MN Srinivas’ book, “The Remembered Village”, which led to an interest in sociology. After a stint at IIT Bombay, he moved to NCBS, partly because, like many, he liked how it looked. Listen to his interview clip, where he compares the demographic at different campuses and shares his thoughts on social mobility. 7-Hierarchy-A1
English is the language of instruction, signage and communication at NCBS, and it is the language for mobility. Student potential – as in the case of interviews – is also judged in English. Satyajit Rath, faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII), agrees with Singh’s assessment of campus demographics. In his interview clip, he discusses the role English plays in reinforcing class distinctions at academic institutions like NII and NCBS, and how some sort of affirmative action is necessary to address class diversity. 7-Hierarchy-A2
Bring reservation up in review committees and meetings on campus, and it makes people very uncomfortable, said one faculty member. Nobody wants to go there. There are no reservation policies for faculty hiring or student selection. Permanent staff hiring has to follow a reservation policy. But this is again loosened for scientific and technical staff. Reservation only applies at the lowest level of hiring for this group. Sanjay Sane, a faculty member and former student at NCBS, shares some of his views in his interview. 7-Hierarchy-A3
There is also the question of hierarchy across the staff of NCBS. In the Centre’s early days, the security guards used to salute the senior faculty when they came in through the gates. It was a matter of habit. It’s what they’d been taught to do in their profession. The faculty put a halt to this practice.
In 1989, Obaid Siddiqi wrote a letter to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), assuring him that the new NCBS will hire locally. “We envisage that the bulk of the staff in the lower categories of employees will be from the local population,” he wrote. In an unintended way, the implied hiring mechanism also runs the risk of reinforcing certain hierarchies that are tied to language barriers. Very few faculty members and students speak Kannada. Many members of the support staff may not speak any other language. There are very few signs at NCBS in Kannada. There has been admirable effort to teach Kannada for many years. But it stopped earlier this year due to a combination of poor attendance and purse tightening.
From its start in 1991, NCBS envisioned a lean staff size, and forecast that a lot of the support work would be done by contract agencies. Ranjith, a lab manager at NCBS, narrates a story about hierarchies. He first discusses the disconnect that many staff members might have from the science at NCBS. He then shares his views on how hierarchies form as a result of having a vast pool of temporary staff or people under contract, which comes with its own insecurity. To be temporary, in a sense, is to also work under fear. 7-Hierarchy-A4
That said, there’s also been an effort since the beginning of NCBS to bend toward a more egalitarian culture. New students and staff quickly learn that they are expected to call faculty by their first names. New students remark how it put them off balance at first but it also helped break boundaries very quickly.
Going beyond names though, there’s a less visible class structure; addressing someone by their name does not level the field. Shannon Olsson, faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with her views on wrestling with inherent class structures and figuring out a way to work within and outside of them. 7-Hierarchy-A5
7-NCBS-P1
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Pick the vial off the rack, the one with Drosophila and old media. Pick up a new vial with fresh media from another rack, remove the cotton plug off the old vial, invert the old vial into the new one, watch the flies drift in, drop the old vial into its rack, plug the new vial with enough fresh cotton that it makes a proper plug and a little bit sticks out like a chef’s hat but not so much cotton that you are unable to plug the vial, pick up another old vial off the rack….That’s a few seconds. The fly facility technician is in the zone.
Flies have been part of NCBS since it began in 1991, and going all the way back to Obaid Siddiqi’s 1970s work at TIFR and Caltech. Today, NCBS is one of the very few centres in India with a dedicated fly facility. The facility supplies Drosophila lines to various research institutes in India as well as other places around the world. The facility staff performs a variety of tasks. One transfers fly across vials, another aligns Drosophila embryos, yet another injects the embryos as part of the facility’s process of producing transgenic Drosophila. But Deepti Trivedi, a scientist in charge of the fly facility, often wonders what her staff is thinking of when in the flow of fly work. There’s also a language barrier. She doesn’t speak Kannada. Many don’t speak English. In her interview, Trivedi shares some views on talking science with her staff. 7-NCBS Community-A1
Support staff members run NCBS. They clean bathrooms, weed lawns, process an invoice, manage a key bank, drive a shuttle van, serve coffee, order reagents, turn off the lights and yes, transfer flies. Being creative or engaged is not part of the job description. It might sometimes even be an unreasonable expectation. They do necessary work and occasionally work that nobody else wants to do. Sometimes people do what they do because they need the money. That’s the story of a significant proportion of NCBS staff, not just today but across its history.
The 1990-92 NCBS proposal is fairly emphatic about the way the institute would be structured: “What we wish to do was expressed pithily by Abraham Flexner when he proposed the creation of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. Flexner suggested that the Institute \"...should be small, that its staff and students or scholars should be few, that the administration should be inconspicuous, inexpensive and subordinate, that the member of the teaching staff, while freed from the waste of time involved in administrative work, should freely participate in decisions involving the character, quality and direction of its activities.” (Also see the Institution Building – Autonomy Theme).
The slideshow below shows an annexure from a 1996 Project Management Committee meeting. NCBS tries to keep a total of about 60 permanent non-academic staff, expecting that the facilities work will be done by people “on contract to external agencies”. Listen to the audio clip of Shaju Varghese, an administrative officer (services) at NCBS. He discusses his work at TIFR before he moved to NCBS in the early 1990s, the scale of work at NCBS today, and the limitations of a system with very few permanent staff members. 7-NCBS Community-A4 And listen to H Bhagya, member of the cleaning services at NCBS since 2001, as she describes her path to NCBS and interaction with the scientific work. 7-NCBS Community-A2
7-NCBS-PS1
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In an outreach talk to the NCBS administration in 2009 on olfaction in Drosophila, Obaid Siddiqi started by saying that the scientific career was a self-rewarding one. And he wondered “Is administration – if it is mere service – self rewarding?” Check out the slideshow below for the whole talk. Highlighting the nature of service, this task of engaging the staff, lies on the shoulders of its management. For a while a few years ago, NCBS ran a successful seminar series for the staff where faculty members described their work to a broader audience.
7-NCBS-PS2
\r\n
Every now and then, a unique relation develops between a faculty member and support staff member. In the early 2000s, Sunil Prabhakar joined Obaid Siddiqi's lab as an assistant, offering technical assistance for fly behavior experiments, stock keeping and management of laboratory consumables. He would later continue to do a Masters, and then pursue a PhD. (Hop over to the Sandbox – Space Tour theme to hear Trivedi’s recollections of the bantering between Siddiqi and Prabhakar). Also listen to Sanjay Sane, faculty member at NCBS, talk about the work of M Kemparaju, his long-term lab assistant with an astonishing knowledge of butterflies. To Sane, M Kemparaju is unique and irreplaceable “He’s the person who keeps us employed,” says Sane. And yet, he is relatively unemployable outside NCBS since nobody needs his skill as much as Sane does. 7-NCBS Community-A3
The career growth track for support staff has varied across the history of TIFR and NCBS. Lab assistants going on to do PhDs were not uncommon in TIFR’s Molecular Biology Unit (MBU). For more on that, head to the Gallery for a couple of contrasting stories from Champakali Ayyub and PN Bhavsar.
Have you seen cells?
Yes, we’ve seen cells, reply the kids. They’re between 13 and 15 years old.
Have you seen real cells?
No, the kids haven’t seen real cells. So, H Krishnamurthy shows them cells in culture under the microscope.
There are some dead cells in this. Can you show me which ones are the dead cells?
And thus, on a Saturday morning, they start out on their first cell biology experiment.
In 1978, Krishnamurthy saw a laser for the first time. He also saw liquid nitrogen that Sunday. At the time, Krishnamurthy was a first year Pre University College (PUC) student in Bangalore. H Narasimahaiah, who had founded the Bangalore Science Forum in 1962, visited his college and announced that he was going to take the students to IISc. Krishnamurthy, who is the head of cytometry and imaging facilities at NCBS, has seen a few lasers since that Sunday. But that first time was special. “I can’t forget the day of seeing the laser and that excitement,” he says.
It’s one of the reasons Krishnamurthy can often be seen around NCBS on weekends with an entourage of students. They challenge him with their questions and ideas, as on that day, when he asked them to identify dead cells. Listen to his interview clip to learn more about how the kids went about solving his problem. 7-Outside-A1
There are perhaps a few broad ways to measure NCBS’ bond to the outside world.
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One is in how its members take their knowledge out and bring the broader community in. A scan of the activities across the campus would give one the sense that outreach is just part of the ethos. Some students teach at local schools, as do faculty members. Some, like Krishnamurthy, host students on campus. The Centre hosts a science journalism workshop every summer. The ecology, evolution and conservation biology researchers engage with the public through NCBS field stations and museum tours (and a Moth Day on campus). This past summer, Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee and Dasaradhi Palakodeti, faculty members at NCBS and InStem, started Perspectivo, “a magazine of the sciences and the humanities”. Visitors on campus tours are a routine sight. An active Research Development Office spearheads much of the effort. There’s an annual Open Day for the public in November. And for more than a decade, the Science and Society program at NCBS has been funding and hosting projects and events that dovetail science and the humanities and explore the history of science. It’s a lot to take in. And it can seem contradictory to the refrain that to be in NCBS is to live in a bubble, perhaps only illustrative of different perceptions. The thing of interest is the ready engagement of the faculty in outreach, especially since it doesn’t necessarily count toward their academic output. But when asked about the seemingly wide array of outreach activities, one faculty member looked bemused. Yes, he replied. It was a natural thing to do. How else should it be?
A second measure is to assess how NCBS community members carry out their work in a way that assimilates with broader societal concerns. One example is the MSc Wildlife Programme. When it started in 2003, it took a slightly different approach to education. This was in the nature of the program, which was outward looking and needed a student body that could engage with issues far beyond the lab. Listen to Ajith Kumar, NCBS faculty member and one of the founders of the programme, talk about where his students come from, where they go, and an eclectic curriculum from genetics to public policy to environmental law while they’re at the Centre. 7-Outside-A4
\nThese bridges to society could be seen as being part of a longer trend in spreading a scientific attitude. Arguably, it started decades ago at TIFR, most notably with the articles and opinion pieces written by BM Udgaonkar, a faculty member at TIFR. Udgaonkar would later go on to found the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education. A glance at the list of publications intended at a general audience gives us an understanding of this body of work, especially the 1979-80 work on ‘Scientific Temper and Public Policy’.
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But coupled with these measures of engaging with the outside world is another one: to see how members of the NCBS community get involved with issues beyond the campus. At NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi is often cited as an example of a politically involved academic, especially from his younger days. In the featured video below, the economist, Prabhat Patnaik, summarizes the political involvement of Obaid Siddiqi while in college in the late 1940 and early 1950s.
Many senior members of the faculty themselves grew up in environments where they were tuned into the issues of the time. Listen, for instance, to the views of Upinder Bhalla, faculty member at NCBS. Bhalla grew up in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus with two parents heavily involved in political action, and he reflects on current campus life at NCBS. 7-Outside-A3 Here, the general perception is that students are growing up “apolitical”, as seen in one of the images in the slideshow above. Also hear Debakshi Mullick, a current PhD student at NCBS, for views on what happened at NCBS during the student pay hike protests in 2015. 7-Outside-A5
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Siddiqi did change his views over the years, compared to his student days. In July 1988, Society magazine (yes) published an interview of Obaid Siddiqi (“What's India's No. 1 microbiologist doing with fruit flies?”). The slideshow below has excerpts from that interview, one of the few where he freely shares his reflections on a leftist leaning in college, and the changes he saw in himself over time.
To engage with the outside world is, in a way, a process of introspection, about one’s professional growth, one's role as a member of the society, and the connections in between. In the last session of his 2003 oral history interview, Siddiqi shared his views on value questions in science:
“Well, value questions would always remain in the history [of science], they are the same questions. There are so many kinds of questions – one is the problem of spreading scientific attitude. This was assumed in early years in the Nehru era, the idea was that scientific attitude is a good thing and it will run up science against superstition. That was the accepted policy. Now that seems to have gone and now people have the idea that scientific method will not be the method for changing [attitude to superstitions]. So that question remains. The other value questions – that in science itself – do you have a right to pursue science for science [sake] or is [science] only a means of doing something for the good of others? That is also a value question – [particularly for] science in a poor country....
Human rights is a very strong value question. These questions are seen as trivial and they don’t think too much about this. But on these questions that scientists should speak out because scientists are to a large extent being supported by the government and government money. Scientists have become very timid. And in public they don’t express themselves on government policy. Now that is a value question. Scientists should be able to express their views on social, political [issues]. I think those are much more important things.”