3 50 920 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/e0bd59165dc69de3fcb7238e36f68b70.mp3 57063714819ff11aef06e52e3607c983 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource mmjohri_seaweed-tifr-shores-1969_RESEARCH-PROCESS Description An account of the resource Man Mohan Johri, retired faculty member from TIFR: Picking up seaweed off the shores of TIFR for his early research in the late 1960s. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Process https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/ed8c6279f1084f127cac1c50c933f4b1.mp3 2c14c5578f6b29e7102b6aa72d6aa86c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource ranjith_lab-kitchen-media-numbers_RESEARCH-PROCESS Description An account of the resource PP Ranjith, early hire as lab manager at NCBS: The scale of work in the lab kitchen, by the numbers. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Process https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/96732c1e7df2a4ea6f8cc7e6537923ea.mp3 54e40383def16b82e14331ccb3597a11 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource shannon_negative-result_RESEARCH-PROCESS Description An account of the resource Shannon Olsson, faculty member at NCBS: On the importance of publishing negative results Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Process https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/d7325450fb3a397a062ae60a7162defc.mp3 124fdba5ad10568bbfd0bb258cf2ea21 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource jayant_areas-sketch-1992_RESEARCH-SHIFT Description An account of the resource Jayant Udgaonkar, faculty member at NCBS: On the September 1992 sketch looking at the different areas of research for NCBS Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Shifts-A0 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/618d5573dae61bf2c71521d3f24e7314.mp3 5f1e0af183a53f469eb83fe98bb3d647 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource upi_hire-computing-ravi_RESEARCH-COLLAB Description An account of the resource Upinder Bhalla, faculty member at NCBS: On early computational work with Ravi Iyengar in systems neurobiology, on Iyengar's persistence in pushing Bhalla along to publish field-altering research: a bistable biochemical feedback loop that could aid in storing memory, and on NCBS giving him the freedom to work on a problem. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Shifts-A1 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/64dbc5de1bb8ddf33b135fd7ff098341.mp3 8c267add46ca41867f04b9de4b4b6aef Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource jitu_ncbs-research-information-organism_RESEARCH-SHIFT Description An account of the resource Satyajit Mayor, faculty member and current director, NCBS: On a projected area of research, to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Shifts-A2 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/39233bf44a8f7b4fc00eb9c96fc32d98.mp3 2789cc1ff2afae6853abf26a44fd69d0 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource OS_neurobiology-shift_RESEARCH-INFLECTION Description An account of the resource Obaid Siddiqi, founding member of NCBS & TIFR's molecular biology unit: On his shift to neurobiology in the early 1970s. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource TIFR Archives 4-Shifts-A3 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/360afe249ae6a70d7f25cae99e57f23f.mp3 93c54dfad26a9894c0154433563e8649 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource ajith_Msc-wildlife-start_RESEARCH-SHIFT Description An account of the resource Ajith Kumar, NCBS faculty member and co-ordinator of MSc programme in Wildlife Biology: On the origins of the MSc programme in Wildlife Biology at NCBS Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Shifts-A4 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/c9b13b8c089fe290ba70d4dda91e6ef3.mp3 535b3f10c515f3bd3a70246ab5c9bd8b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource gaiti_1989—solo-paper-env_EDUCATION-MENTOR_RESEARCH-COLLB Description An account of the resource Gaiti Hasan, faculty member at NCBS: On her work in the 1980s, publishing a series of single author papers in the late 1980s, and the research environment at TIFR. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Shifts https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/d1e845358678a882a19b04dc758d03d5.mp3 3695fdd5bab46e00611045ee12230237 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource gaiti_early-MBU-1983-89-behavior-genetics_RESEARCH-SHIFT Description An account of the resource Gaiti Hasan, faculty member at NCBS: On the work around behaviour and genetics at TIFR in the 1980s Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Shifts https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/c4351a5c94bdd87a421ea87976369a54.mp3 0a84ec81b07c71aa047401792a748b48 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource jitu_madan-theory_RESEARCH-SHIFT Description An account of the resource Satyajit Mayor, faculty member and current director, NCBS: On cementing the relationship between cell biology and theoretical work, with a decade-plus collaboration. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Shifts https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/9f459c768439ab9b4bcde2abe8dcafa3.mp3 be69e60171cc706bb831a8ae0a7d2ecc Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource OS_IARI-hailstorm_RESEARCH-INFLECTION Description An account of the resource Obaid Siddiqi, founding member of NCBS & TIFR's molecular biology unit: Memories of a hail storm that destroyed his research at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in the 1950s, prompting a move to Glasgow for his PhD Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource TIFR Archives 4-Shifts https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/693969f4e1f0ea7ff04d01c8ec0545d3.mp3 c1b3756e3773995f1171a7033cff3cb2 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource OS_science-choosing_RESEARCH-SHIFT Description An account of the resource Obaid Siddiqi, founding member of NCBS & TIFR's molecular biology unit: The naming of NCBS groups, hierarchy within a lab and the way the names sometimes reflect the background work of the lead individual. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource TIFR Archives 4-Shifts https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/25bda866459efaabe3b832f5e6e1f94c.mp3 d06d9fc78ced5b48215383ee1b5a406e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource sanjay_science-paper-military_RESEARCH-INFLECTION Description An account of the resource Sanjay Sane, faculty member and former student at NCBS: Reflecting on the various lives of a research paper, including the interest from the military on his group's research at UC Berkeley. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Shifts https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/a19f4fc5fe122d9ec47ae402cf47f936.mp3 a0a1f96c417d8e5da8d345cad8ad342c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource sowdhamini_neuroscience-1994_RESEARCH-SHIFT Description An account of the resource R Sowdhamini, faculty member at NCBS: On a delay in her hiring due to an NCBS faculty search in the mid 1990s for neuroscience researchers. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Shifts https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/c560e6ab33a1327d6246e10a0256b825.mp3 f1b6a3ca75d2afa6a8d1f064732bd5ad Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource uma_ecology-start-Msc_RESEARCH-SHIFT Description An account of the resource Uma Ramakrishnan, faculty member at NCBS: On the start of an MSc programme in wildlife biology and her hiring as one of the first faculty members in ecology and evolution Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Shifts https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/f78c45629bf89eaea69395c29633f775.mp3 8869f51ec21534de6746edc2a6d87798 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource aditi_funda-translation_RESEARCH-TOGGLE Description An account of the resource Aditi Bhattacharya, research scientist and former student: On her memories of the research climate when she was a graduate student in the early 2000s, and the connects between fundamental and translational research. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Toggle-A1 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/9cd09a86561cc556c66a043357a32fb7.mp3 7cab561a8987a835423df1b06a04f0a9 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource villoo_NCBS-start-avesthagen_RESEARCH-TOGGLE Description An account of the resource Villoo Patell, early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and entrepreneur: Reflections on starting a company in NCBS in the mid to late 1990s, and the research environment at the time. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Toggle-A2 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/49109d53bf6ac8d338dd76d267e06bf2.mp3 01fa2327e394396a18eb3227900df4bb Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sudhir_Funda-applied-not-obaidophile_RESEARCH-TOGGLE Description An account of the resource Sudhir Krishna, faculty member at NCBS: Reflections on fundamental and applied research and the distinctions from one early philosophy of Obaid Siddiqi. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Toggle-A3 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/1d14ad9db0b66e8fe3127fb13ceab0d3.mp3 dff67b33cbf31b0192fd7508a57207e7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource taslim_C-CAMP-benefit_RESEARCH-TOGGLE Description An account of the resource Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director, C-CAMP: On the benefits of C-CAMP in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Toggle-A4 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/9987d84baf54cd920cdd8cd21755e19c.mp3 892113b925547bd6a0946437089f66fe Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource shannon_basic-applied-no-diff_RESEARCH-TOGGLE Description An account of the resource Shannon Olsson, faculty member at NCBS: On an education where she hardly ever saw the distinction between fundamental and applied research. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Toggle-A5 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/ef2b4497fab29256a857bbf4caea6d95.mp3 42dac6cb1db2efac3d81a966021b6e55 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource mohan_vibration-breeding_RESEARCH-TOOL Description An account of the resource H Mohan, in charge of the animal house at NCBS: Tales from the process of science - the effect of vibration and construction on lab animals. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Tool-A1 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/1b027e06a637c75a1378fbf4d80cf9dc.mp3 4785d2fc2d3d131fa243740c93cdb024 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource panic_fluorescence-stem-cell_RESEARCH-QUERY-TOOL Description An account of the resource Mitradas Panicker, faculty member at NCBS: The back story to his group's 2014 work on endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells and mouse epiblast stem cells, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213671114001453 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Tool-A2 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/4e95420accd297bf4fc56222a845f52a.mp3 d535fbe2105707f7ff0d112dcdc57b87 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource jitu_zeiss-scope-2cam-rocksteady_RESEARCH-TOOLS Description An account of the resource Satyajit Mayor, faculty member and current director, NCBS: On his group's work with industry partners in customising and developing tools for basic research questions, which then become standard products in the field. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Tool-A3 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/a541e9e5eeb675721f1cb20c9aeb584a.mp3 b4720de61d88d8fdb0fb710db9c27c03 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource mathew_central-question-holy-grail_RESEARCH-QUERY-TOOL Description An account of the resource MK Mathew, faculty member at NCBS: On the drive that having a central question in research offers in one's scientific career. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Tool-A4 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/1c893f3df34d260405e135e2f9fd010a.mp3 543f2e97f90d06147338cc544547a535 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource rnsingh_kusum-cutting-slices-1980s_RESEARCH-TOOLS Description An account of the resource RN Singh, early faculty member at TIFR, and Kusum Singh, his partner: Early microtome work and the technical skill behind manually cutting slices. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Tool-A5 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/efbaa58815bf73ed52738e5268a56253.mp3 7ce1979a2177afcefa11bd772dca6ebb Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource deepti_CRISPR_RESEARCH-TOOL-QUERY Description An account of the resource Deepti Trivedi, technology scientist at NCBS: On introducing CRISPR as a research tool on the NCBS campus. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Tool https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/9d3d1a73ec560bdbd74b7224820def61.mp3 46f4a2477b22cc83ce70bf417e9e94f6 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Madhumala_Smell-explain_RESEARCH-QUERY Description An account of the resource KS Madhumala, post doctoral researcher at NCBS: Explaining the broader questions that drive her research and the field of olfactory behaviour. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Tool https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/ff0fb1497da7db1a30a0f91a6c2dccab.mp3 adc9aa289742f3ab3765c6696bb6a60a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Research Description An account of the resource In 1944, when Homi Bhabha wrote to Dorabji Tata about setting up an institute for advanced physics, he stressed that the disappointing state of research in India was due to the absence of “outstanding pure research workers”. These were the origins for TIFR. It’s a different climate today. One of the chapters in the Research theme takes a selection of stories that highlight the perceived differences in fundamental (or basic, or pure) research and applied (or translational) research. Another chapter looks at the shifts in the areas of research covered in biology over the last 60 years, and the meaning embedded in the nomenclature. The feedback loop between the research question and the tools available to answer them is often debated in the scientific community. The query and tools chapter picks out stories from the history of experimentation at NCBS and TIFR’s molecular biology unit, and the occasional bridge between research and industry. Then, there is the process of the scientific work itself. Stories from the process is about the backstory, as it were, to the published paper, from collecting seaweed from outside TIFR to notes about tree-living mammals on Braille paper. The Institute had been around for more than 16 years already. But Homi Bhabha thought he’d explain again to his audience what he meant by the word ‘fundamental research’ during the inauguration of the TIFR building on January 15, 1962. “Basic investigations into the behaviour and structure of the physical world, without any consideration of their utility or whether the knowledge so acquired would ever be of any practical value,” he said. It was a valuable sentiment at the time, this pivot away from all things practical. “If much of the applied research done in India today is disappointing or of very inferior quality, it is entire due to the absence of a sufficient number of outstanding pure research workers,” said Bhabha, in a March 1944 pitch for the Institute to Sir Sorab Tata. The idea was simple: focus on research for the sake of pursuing a question, without any regard to application. The featured video includes more excerpts from those 1962 speeches. 4-Toggle-V1 But, as is seen in his 1945 Institute inauguration speech included in the slideshow below, it was not all black and white. The application of science was always considered an end that would justify the means: a puritanical study with blinders. “Science forms the basis of our whole social structure without which life as we know would be inconceivable,” he said. “As Marx said, ‘Man's power of nature is at the root of history’...Science has at last opened up the possibility of freedom for all from long hours of manual drudgery.” 4-Toggle-PS2 The history of NCBS, too, is sprinkled with this back and forth between fundamental and applied research. This includes the possibility of collaborations with industry, a topic that has been debated at length at NCBS and one that predictably goes back to the nature of the research question. See the meeting minutes from April 2000 in the slideshow below, where the faculty offer their diverse views in response to a potential collaboration with Reliance Industries. Also listen to the interview excerpt of Sudhir Krishna, a faculty member at NCBS. He discusses his advocacy of industry and university collaborations, adding that NCBS today is “mature enough to benefit from different viewpoints.” 4-Toggle-A3 4-Toggle-PS1 Aditi Bhattacharya, a research faculty at InStem, recollects the atmosphere and the nature of the basic/applied toggle a little over a decade ago when she was a PhD student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A1 It’s worth pointing out despite this apparent divide between fundamental and applied work, NCBS did seem to have an open approach to research from the start. That is, one could probe fundamental research questions that are driven both by plain old curiosity as well as societal needs. Take, for instance, a time at the start of the Centre. In the mid 1990s, Villoo Patell joined NCBS after her PhD, with a broader intent of being a “bridge between academia and industry and do something innovative in agriculture.” In her clip, Patell, founder of the biotechnology company, Avesthagen, shares how she kept expanding her group and eventually morphed her work into a startup in the late 1990s. 4-Toggle-A2 That is roughly the model that the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) operates in today. Hear Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director of C-CAMP, as he shares his opinion on its benefits in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. 4-Toggle-A4 In some ways, the debate can start to feel a little tiring. Does fundamental research have meaning without application, however invisible it is? And does applied research have sufficient value and depth without a fundamental research underpinning? That’s the nature of the toggle for TIFR and NCBS, and, arguably, much of the scientific world. But in just the juxtaposition of those questions, one sees blurry boundaries. In her interview, Shannon Olsson shares her experience prior to joining NCBS. Sometimes, just in the very nature of the debate questions emerges a third view, the falseness of the dichotomy. 4-Toggle-A5 How does one remember things? Learning to ride a bicycle, for instance, might have been a wobbly experience and resulted in a few falls. But over time, pedalling seems rather effortless. One just seems to know it. This information – memory – is somehow encoded in the brain. Existing research suggests that electrical signals across nerve cells tweak the strength of synapses, the connections between the nerve cells. Memories form as a result of these changes in synapses. But that still doesn’t tell us how the synapse ‘remembers’ its state. One way for the synapse to have stable changes is with some sort of a biological switch that might emerge from a network of biochemical reactions. This network was on Upinder Bhalla’s mind when he joined NCBS in early 1996. Bhalla had just moved to the Centre from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, where he and Ravi Iyengar, his post doctoral advisor, had charted out a model of molecular interactions. They looked at signalling pathways in memory – a sort of molecular call-and-response eventually resulting in some biological function, like dividing a cell. Bhalla and Iyengar focused their efforts on how the pathways interact with each other, and then see if the network threw up any new properties. It was a laborious process. Bhalla pored over paper after paper for every link in the network, and did simulation after simulation to see how it behaved. And just when he thought he was done, Iyengar would ask him to add another pathway to the map. For the first few years, as he settled into NCBS, Bhalla had little to show in terms of publication or research output. He had doubts of the work and where it was leading. But NCBS had given him the freedom to pursue his work. And Iyengar had more faith, and knew they were onto something special. It was special. They could start to see unique properties embedded in the network models that hinted at the possibility of information being a biological commodity. Through simulations, they showed that a feedback loop in the biochemical reactions could result in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9888852">bistable behaviour</a>, and thus could be a way to store memory. In his interview clip, Bhalla reflects on this time and the impact of their 1999 Science paper. 4-Shifts-A1 Bhalla’s hiring was a research shift of sorts at NCBS. Nobody at NCBS worked on that kind of stuff. It was also in keeping with a broader plan. The guiding principles at the new institute were roughly to find a really qualified person, whatever their field might be, and let them pursue their science with freedom. But at the same time, keep a broader institute vision in mind to ensure that, as a whole, the research output at NCBS was a balanced approach to studying biology across scales. In September 1992, NCBS chalked out possible areas of research at the new institute. Obaid Siddiqi’s interview clip in the Gallery and Jayant Udgaonkar’s memories of that meeting shown below reflect this philosophy. 4-Shifts-A0 4-Shifts-PS4 When Siddiqi started at TIFR in 1962, he had already established his name in the field. With Alan Garen, his post doctoral advisor, he led the discovery of suppressors of “nonsense” mutations. These are mutations that would prematurely terminate the translation of the genetic code into proteins. Starting a Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) at TIFR was a deliberate name choice, a departure from the classical aspects of zoology and botany, and a focus on using genetics to look at molecular structure across life. It was a new way of addressing biology at the time. PK Maitra joined soon after Siddiqi to focus on yeast genetics. Along with Zita Lobo, he would, over the years, become a leading expert in understanding the genetics of breaking down sugar. 1960s at MBU centred on bacterial and yeast genetics to a large extent. The featured slideshow below shows records that discuss research focus in those early years at TIFR. “Although we are quite conscious of the fact that, in the long run the MBU must concentrate its efforts on a well defined long term programme, we have felt that such a programme of collaborative work should develop in a natural way after necessary trial and exploration,” Siddiqi wrote in a November 1966 note to MGK Menon, then director of TIFR. In the same note, Siddiqi makes his intention clear of broadening the work to neurobiology and developmental biology. This note came after his trip to the United States in the summer of 1966, and at a time when there was a broader push in the field to move beyond unicellular organisms and classical biology. In June 1963, Brenner sent a <a href="http://hobertlab.org/how-the-worm-got-started">letter</a> to then director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He opined that “the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other areas of biology, notably development and the nervous system”. Brenner focused on the nematode, C. elegans. Seymour Benzer, another pioneering researcher at Caltech, chose Drosophila. Siddiqi would eventually work closely with Benzer at Caltech. In a 1969 letter, Seymour Benzer invites Siddiqi and says he is glad Siddiqi was “becoming serious about switching to neurobiology”. After the Caltech sabbatical, Siddiqi would return to TIFR, and persuade a few others to join him in the Drosophila shift in the early 1970s. Siddiqi discusses this switch in his interview clip. The switch would shape the course of work to date at NCBS and TIFR’s Department of Biological Sciences. 4-Shifts-A3 4-Shifts-P1 The group was also open to hiring people from different backgrounds. For instance, in 1968, P Babu, a particle physicist, returned from a post doctoral stint at Caltech and felt compelled to pursue molecular biology. In the featured video, Babu reflects upon that period and his future work on the neurogenetics of C. elegans. And in parallel with these areas, a disease model approach to biology made a brief appearance in TIFR in the 1970s, with MR Das’s work on breast cancer. 4-Shifts-V1 By the latter half of the 1970s, the collaborations between Siddiqi and his student, Veronica Rodrigues, led to the understanding of olfactory and taste genes in Drosophila. Shobhona Sharma recalled a rich intellectual environment coupled with an idyllic setting. “In the Shantiniketan style, we would carry the blackboard to the West lawns with the magnificent sea-view,” she wrote, as part of a series of memories to celebrate Obaid Siddiqi’s 80th birthday. In the early 1980s, Gaiti Hasan joined the group as a post doctoral researcher, with an interest of using genetics to study behaviour. There weren’t many places in the world doing this at the time and TIFR was one of them. Listen to Hasan’s interview clip in the Gallery as she discusses the difficulties in looking at genetics of behaviour in those early days. Hasan joined to work with LC Padhy, but ended up working solo most of the time since Padhy was looking at oncogenes in Drosophila, genes that cause a normal cell to become a tumour cell. It was an extension, in a sense, of his cancer-related work with MR Das in the 1970s. This was also a period when Siddiqi and Vidyanand Nanjundiah were drafting the plan of a new biology centre, and one where they felt they should also pursue the biology of higher organisms. The 1983 proposal hints at a centre that will make research connections at different levels of biology. “It was clear that we wanted (the) Centre to be devoted to areas at all levels, starting with biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology at the hardware lowest level and neurobiology, behaviour, theoretical biology, evolution at the higher level - and between those which groups you choose and which particular [group you develop] would depend on what kind of people you got, [but] that you cannot spell out anyway,” said Siddiqi in his 2003 oral history interview. K VijayRaghavan, who joined as a PhD student at TIFR in the late 1970s, would later become a key driver of developmental biology at NCBS. And his collaboration with Rodrigues shifted her group’s emphasis from neurobiology of behaviour to developmental neuroscience. The initial faculty at NCBS did not have a biochemistry focus. When Jayant Udgaonkar moved from Stanford University to TIFR/NCBS in 1990, he brought in that angle. Over time, he developed a strong research foundation in protein folding, misfolding and unfolding. Indeed, a wordcloud extracted from abstracts of NCBS papers published in the first five years throws up one outlier: <a href="https://twitter.com/thattai/status/773542336240373760">protein(s)</a>. Today, his group’s work on protein structures also attempts to connect with understanding diseases, as is evident in papers on protein malfunctions that may lead to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. In 1998, R Sowdhamini joined the faculty. Over the years, her group honed a slightly different line of research on proteins. Amino acids are building blocks of proteins. But just knowing the list of these constituent chain elements may not necessarily tell us much about the function of the chain – the protein. Two proteins that have a similar function may be comprised of very different amino acid sequences, perhaps by random evolutionary events. Using a variety of computational techniques, Sowdhamini’s group studies what similarities might exist between different protein structures. This computational work is in itself a bridge between biochemistry foundations and theoretical predictions on protein function. Making connections is part of the underlying belief of the September 1992 sketch of areas of research at NCBS. The study of infectious diseases surfaced at NCBS that year with the hiring of Sudhir Krishna. Here again, as Siddiqi mentions in his interview clip, research area names were moulded around the work of individuals, not the other way around. With the addition of more faculty, an area of research that was called “Immunology” became “Biology of infectious diseases”, and then, by 2000, “Cellular organization and signalling” to reflect the broader interests of the area faculty. The study of the life and death of immune systems got a boost around that time with the hiring of Apurva Sarin. Today, relations between medicine and research have strengthened considerably. In January 2016, the campus announced a new program for <a href="http://news.ncbs.res.in/story/accelerating-application-stem-cell-technology-human-disease">“Accelerating the application of Stem cell technology in Human Disease”</a>, or ASHD. Under the program, inStem, NCBS and NIMHANS will collaborate on using stem cells to study mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The program is funded by the Department of Biotechnology and the Pratiksha Trust. In addition to mental illnesses, inStem and CMC Vellore will develop methods like gene therapy to combat hereditary blood disorders like Sickle Cell Disease, which has a high prevalence rate in India. The September 1992 sketch had a column for future research. Titled "other areas", this column included theoretical biology. And it did happen, though defining a start point for the theory group is a little tricky. Since his joining in 1996, Upinder Bhalla has deftly gone back and forth between theory and experiment. And Satyajit Mayor started conversations with a physicist, Madan Rao in the late 1990s. Over the years, this, along with a “Physics in Biology” programme initiative in the early 2000s, led to the introduction of theoretical biology at NCBS, a distinguishing feature when compared to many biology centres in the world. Today, the theory group stands as a cohesive unit with a core faculty, and others like Bhalla and Sowdhamini who cross over from biochemistry and neurobiology. The underlying philosophy of the group is one where organisms are seen as “living machines: products of natural selection which consume energy to achieve specific goals”. 4-Shifts-PS1 The 1983 proposal also envisioned a future centre with work on “yet higher levels such as ecology, social behaviour and evolution”. It also featured in the September 1992 sketch, still chalked out as a future area of research. Remarkably, this happened, starting with the Memorandum of Understanding in December 1999 to start an MSc programme in Wildlife Biology, between the Centre for Wildlife Studies, National Institute for Advanced Studies and NCBS. The slideshow and Ajith Kumar’s interview clip offer more insight. The programme eventually kicked off in 2003. And it was around that time that NCBS started hiring a program in ecology and evolution, with Uma Ramakrishnan’s work on the genetic heritage of South Asia and then, later, with Mahesh Sankaran’s work on savanna ecosystems in Africa and India. 4-Shifts-A4 4-Shifts-PS2 With that, pretty much every area of research mentioned in the 1992 sketch is covered across the campus. Which then begs the question, where to next? Mayor hints at some possibilities in his excerpt. Listen to him discuss the potential for NCBS to bridge the scales of biology through an intricate understanding of information flow in organisms. 4-Shifts-A2 On a cold February morning in 1998, Sumantra Chattarji and his family stared at the charred wreck of their home in Metford, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They had rushed out in time before it completely burned down. But everything they had owned, and packed, ready to take to NCBS, was gone. All Chattarji could do was to briefly go back into the wreck to look for things like their passports and his baby’s ultrasound picture. Chattarji eventually made it to Bangalore later that year. He had also convinced NCBS to let him ship an electrophysiology rig from Boston. But the rig languished in NCBS – there were no animals for his research. Without a clear project to work on, Chattarji did what he could for the next few months: read. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he read about stress. Soon, he formulated a plan to study stress in the amygdala, the part of the brain related to emotions. His research partner? A former student of agriculture, Ajai Vyas. Had he ever seen a rat, Chattarji asked. Well, they did have a chapter on how to kill rats with pesticides, Vyas said. Perfect, Chattarji thought. “This is going to work out just fine”. Listen to him narrate how that turned out. 4-Process-A0 4-Process-PS4 Such stories, the process of science, are often missing in scientific papers. But they are critical, especially since they show how circumstance shapes work. Listen to Satyajit Mayor’s story on his 1998 paper on how GPI-anchored proteins are organized at the cell surface; 4-Process-A3 to Mitradas Panicker on why pregnant mice shipped from Hyderabad to Bangalore were not pregnant; 4-Process-A4 and to PN Bhavsar on drawing blood from horses as a source of nucleic acid for the lab, in the late 1960s at TIFR. 4-Process-A1 There are more stories in the Gallery, on collecting seaweed off of TIFR, writing down notes on Braille paper, and KS Krishnan’s snails and brain blender. 4-Process-PS1 One of the difficulties researchers had in working at NCBS in the early days was that they couldn’t get their animals in time. For instance, it became an uphill task in the first five years to get Xenopus, a frog species and model organism. And in his interview, Dasaradhi Palakodeti shares a story about the difficulties of transporting another model organism, planaria, when he moved from the United States to India.4-Process-A2 4-Process-P1 The process of science culminates, at least in the academic world, in the written scientific article or general interest narrative. What remains largely invisible is how circumstance affects that process. Listen, for instance, to R Sowdhamini’s interview clip explaining her prolific publishing record of over 180 papers in the last 15 years. 4-Process-A5 And see Obaid Siddiqi’s two versions of a 1984 speech on 'Perception of Chemicals' at the Indian Academy of Sciences, to get a sense of his editing process for a public talk. 4-Process-PS2 The process of science also depends on what stage of the career a researcher is in. In a 10-minute clip in the Gallery from a 2012 talk, Siddiqi tells his audience that he was not at a stage then where he could do complicated experiments. To him, sticking to a model organism no matter the complexity of the experiment was not a practical process. And so, he goes back to the question, and how simply and elegantly one could answer it. “Should we continue working with Drosophila?” he asks his Drosophila-leaning audience. “What is it that we can learn that we cannot by, say, working on rats? That is an interesting question.” Cannibalism can be a problem at NCBS. Ask GH Mohan. But first, a little about how he got to this campus. Mohan finished his bachelor’s degree in veterinary science at the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS) in 1997, just before the NCBS construction wrapped up on the same campus. But he had no idea that the Centre was coming up within the campus. As far as he knew, this land where NCBS was being built was wasteland. Then, one day in 2000, he saw a posting for a veterinary trainee position at NCBS. Veterinary colleges usually focused on domestic animals, not lab animals. And Mohan wanted to get more experience. When he actually entered NCBS for the first time in response to the job posting, the stark difference in the way it looked compared to other colleges he’d seen overwhelmed him. “The impression I got,” he said, “it was as if I was coming to a foreign university campus.” Mohan started work at the old temporary animal hut on campus. When they had to move to a different animal house (which has happened a few times), the staff would get as anxious as the animals. Breeding animals is hard. They are sensitive to anything and do not take kindly to being disturbed. Listen to Mohan’s interview where he talks about cannibalism. 4-Tool-A1 The tools of research come in all forms across the history of science. From nucleic acid prepared out of horse blood to transgenic mice; from frogs under a knife to microtome-cut micron slices of fruit flies. Mastering the tools of science is sometimes an art in itself. Listen, for instance, to RN Singh, an early TIFR faculty member, and Kusum Singh, as they share the early TIFR experiences of a microtome in the 1970s and 1980s. They discuss the role of dexterity in cutting thin, neat slices for observation under the microscope. 4-Tool-A5 4-Tool-P1 KS Krishnan is regarded as the consummate tool builder in NCBS history, easily jumping across fields to probe key questions with creative devices. He was known to be a frequent visitor of the glass blowing facility to make things like the famed ‘sushi cooker’, a double-walled glass device to control temperature and isolate mutations (the featured image shows some of the glass blowing facility’s handiwork). Conjuring devices was an innate way in which he went about research, whether it was in the lab or at home. See the video clip where his son, Anand Krishnan, narrates a story of KS Krishnan’s hatred for pigeons and the tools he rigged up to fight them off. 4-Tools-V1 The slideshows contain scans of historic documents that chart the process of building a research facility, both at TIFR and at NCBS. Most of the time, it is with off the shelf equipment. But, as heard in the interview clip of Satyajit Mayor, a faculty member at NCBS, sometimes there’s just no ready tool. Listen to his process of customization. Especially, a story from the late 1990s of trying to build a rock-steady microscope lamp with a halogen lamp pried off a car. 4-Tool-A3 4-Tool-PS1 Mitradas Panicker, a faculty member at NCBS, shares a more recent tale of discovery of endogenous blue fluoroscence markers in induced pluripotent stem cells. The paper has taken upon another life, too. It is a potential research tool licensed by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) to identify and isolate “human pluripotent stem cells from their differentiated counterparts rapidly and efficiently without modifying the cells”. To Panicker, the discovery was an example of how observations play a critical role. “It should have been discovered in 1998,” he said, referring to the time after the first successful isolation of human embryonic stem cells. Listen to his interview where he reflects on why that might not have happened. 4-Tool-A2 In the end, tools are a means to get to an end. That end is typically the research question. It is natural for a scientist to meander and explore different paths and build devices to address a few queries. But it is the research question that guides the nature of engineering. Reflecting on his path in his interview, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, rounds up this chapter with a view on pacing one’s scientific career. 4-Tool-A4 4-Tool-PS2 Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Basic/applied toggle, Areas and Shifts, Processes, Queries and Tools Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Original Format Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource upi_tinkering_RESEARCH-QUERY-TOOL Description An account of the resource Upinder Bhalla, faculty member at NCBS: Perspective on growing up tinkering with electronics and his life-long brush with tinkering as part of the scientific method. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 4-Tool https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/5813ed40ac45b2be6341ccfc7d88ebee.mp3 1870256a2ba92eff2fc5454961cd2e6c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mathew_sinX-biochemistry_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource MK Mathew, faculty member at NCBS: Thoughts on the biochemistry course that he and Jayant Udgaonkar have taught at NCBS almost since the beginning of the Centre. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge-A0 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/b296b9676277e5564b9f6db4271d7649.mp3 46580c02eb6489d96335988c9f7f83ab Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource balaram_teaching-1970s-today_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource P Balaram, professor and ex-director, IISc: On joining as a teacher at IISc in the 1970s and views on the practice of teaching. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge-A1 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/4daed6e2233bc3fe8104b3e043107a9e.mp3 85c7b8c70c9fcc4dbbcc5a50531ac37c Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource saurabh_why-phd-teach_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource Saurabh Mahajan, current PhD student at NCBS: Thoughts on why he is doing a PhD and the need for a more rigorous education in teaching. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge-A2 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/c4d9e6167cb8e5f3e5e05672c52bdc77.mp3 d4378ea84b4c7c2a1e14ea1f48dba08e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource shashi_PhD-future_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource L Shashidhara, early post-doctoral researcher at NCBS, faculty at IISER: On future trajectories for students after they do their PhD and the need to wrestle with this problem in a more cohesive manner. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge-A3 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/b2e73a778437f98810aafe7056bba54f.mp3 8a544c84e2a329d1aa15389dd7419af7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource rath_college-PG-decoupling_GROWTH-STUDENT_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource Satyajit Rath, faculty member at NII: On a nationwide decoupling between college and post-graduate education/research. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge-A4 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/c82f8d266f9aee20a1439d7c7a9581bb.mp3 d7bff5bef756577247420a078393f8ad Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mukund_Students-research_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource Mukund Thattai, a 'Young Investigator' NCBS hire and current faculty member: His perspective on what could or should be the broader purpose of NCBS and its research. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge-A5 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/78ec542c65057abda4a052c673d66b54.mp3 a11dd436e9de1efbb9d15adcbec1914f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource aditi_courses_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource Aditi Bhattacharya, research scientist and former student: On her experiences with coursework as a graduate student in the early 2000s Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/1185701b4b18331941a48de12189dc07.mp3 0e322c7ff322b7836a16490f62a80887 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource deepti_school-college-ncbs_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE_RIPPLE-TOLL Description An account of the resource Deepti Trivedi, technology scientist at NCBS and former student: On the move from Delhi University to NCBS for graduate work and a feeling of being overwhelmed. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/c800faed1aa1c7f84f6b21638018e48f.mp3 b776d128576d681c82e0406287bd193b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource gaiti_1970s-TIFR-summer_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE_PEOPLE-ORIGIN Description An account of the resource Gaiti Hasan, faculty member at NCBS: On a summer spent at TIFR in the 1970s, and the process of being initiated into research. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/a44a6ce7ff64f74444a722248b97ea2c.mp3 d92a3ec0cdd88f0efc78b74075a0d482 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource jayant_coursework-start-TIFR-NCBS_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource Jayant Udgaonkar, faculty member at NCBS: On the need for coursework and his push to build an academic programme (with MK Mathew) at NCBS Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/6dcae4492d2a5792a8e324e564b46c9d.mp3 58180bc98c3a52cb780c00857e44a9bb Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource krishnamurthy_staff-retrain-temp_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource H Krishnamurthy, scientific officer and head of imaging/cytometry, NCBS: On pushing his technical staff to enter into degree programs while working. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/a4c90497015b491767e43f45c659911e.mp3 3937c92033ec8c65c1b1f19ad3f5e2e4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource mathew_expt-ephysiology-rig_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource MK Mathew, faculty member at NCBS: On selection of students, and, for instance, finding people suitable for particulars of working with an electrophysiology rig. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/86ec7f36dc8b417093caca43ec09a408.mp3 e81fa13cb75189d1ce6fe1456fd4a94f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Sudhir_Medicine-research-crack_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource Sudhir Krishna, faculty member at NCBS: The education model in India and the cracks between research and medicine. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/6b0f2745c5c2bd5388610fcb7deac7af.mp3 3326ba8b6763d4b87fa15028a7bb3798 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource swarup_IISER-edu-engg_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource Govind Swarup, former faculty member at TIFR: On the need to integrate engineering and science education for students, and the potential of the IISER model. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/99baf24ddf48f87cbbbbd59f5c0d52bd.mp3 da80c29be8b64aa90e2269c195f5fe91 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource swarup_laddoo-query_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource Govind Swarup, former faculty member at TIFR: The thought process behind selecting students in TIFR interviews. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/9e91b68cca2d3439615bc37bd9794b76.mp3 dff67b33cbf31b0192fd7508a57207e7 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource taslim_C-CAMP-benefit_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director, C-CAMP: On the benefits of C-CAMP in the learning trajectory of a student at NCBS. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/2a2dfef13d99591eec19364ac43a67dc.mp3 8f4ddc58f69e370125b179f2945e379a Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource upi_OS-meet-bio-hate_EDUCATION-KNOWLEDGE Description An account of the resource Upinder Bhalla, faculty member at NCBS: A childhood encounter with Obaid Siddiqi, and an early dislike for biology. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/a57c705365d8b53640f05a7e0323b5b0.mp3 736d89136e49f34549f11582b44cf0f4 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mukund_Ethics_RIPPLE-FRICTION Description An account of the resource Mukund Thattai, a 'Young Investigator' NCBS hire and current faculty member: On teaching an ethics course at NCBS, and on one of the biggest issues facing Indian science Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Knowledge https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/f7e03aec1e9abadb8cef5b2d4c4a90d5.mp3 1e0bcbccafb122a54c883f7e082f68ea Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource vidita_ksk-vr-effect_EDUCATION-MENTOR Description An account of the resource Vidita Vaidya, faculty member at TIFR: The influence of KS Krishnan and Veronica Rodrigues when she joined as a young faculty member at TIFR Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Mentor-A0 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/794d683727d1bad33b9fdd2f4aa7f656.mp3 43c917c20b6f5450a9bd5f6e993cd013 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Madhumala_VR-labnote-hire_EDUCATION-MENTOR Description An account of the resource KS Madhumala, post doctoral researcher at NCBS: Reflections on maintaining lab notes and why she felt she got hired as a student. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Mentor-A1 https://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/files/original/1ab30b6ce669ddbfcf2c1cb8d7c6e469.mp3 f7ef21a889b8c6d191c8f28908d36f21 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Education Description An account of the resource When TIFR started in 1945, it was to set up a place to do fundamental research in physics, not so much to teach physics. However, over the years, it did take in students. The early ones did research at the Institute while getting their PhDs from other universities. The Education theme looks at the post-graduate life in biology across the decades. Why do a PhD and why teach? What is the purpose of a place like NCBS, as it keeps evolving? And what after the PhD? The Building Knowledge chapter peeks into the structure and history of certain courses, what senior faculty thought of the life after their PhDs to be, and what students think of today. It also picks apart the perceived disconnect between college and post-graduate life in India. Any interaction is an education, more so within a research institution. The Mentorship chapter is about that transmission of knowledge. It collects views on four faculty members: Veronica Rodrigues, PK Maitra, Obaid Siddiqi and KS Krishnan. In some form or the other, the four have been repeatedly viewed as mentors by students, faculty and staff at TIFR and NCBS. 5-Knowledge-P1 In the mid 1970s, P Balaram didn’t land in India with huge research aspirations. He had just finished his PhD and post doctoral work in the United States. What he needed above anything else was a job, a teaching job. In that, he wasn’t unique. That was the climate. P Balaram, a retired professor and former director at IISc, finds it hard to explain that to people today. For instance, when he had to jot down his profession on an application, he wrote ‘teacher’. “We were lecturers who lectured, and presumably professors who professed,” he said. In the featured interview clip, P Balaram narrates his views on teaching and its effects on his own research. 5-Knowledge-A1 The 1990-92 NCBS proposal make the Centre’s purpose fairly clear: “The principle aim of the Centre is basic research in biology. The research programmes of the Centre encompass modern biology and biotechnology. Special stress is being laid on molecular biology, genetics and cell biology and on the application of biotechnological methods to fundamental research on higher animals and plants.” NCBS was to be a research centre, first and foremost. And while the next paragraph does say that the “Centre will conduct an active teaching and training programme”, it is mentioned as a corollary to research. There might be a slight reversal of roles today. In June 2016, a faculty member at NCBS was asked by a visitor to campus about her profession and what NCBS did. Teaching, said the faculty member. They taught graduate students. Research was not the first thing she said. That broader view of NCBS’ purpose today is one that is partly echoed by Mukund Thattai, a faculty member at NCBS. Hear his interview clip where he shares his thoughts on how NCBS should be measured. 5-Knowledge-A5 It’s worth looking at this education paradigm from the other side, too. Why do a PhD? Saurabh Mahajan, a current PhD student, shares his reasons in his interview. Again, one sees the teaching sentiment echoed. 5-Knowledge-A2 Setting up a graduate programme was one of the biggest changes at TIFR, stressed Sudhanshu Jha, former director of TIFR, in an interview earlier this year. It ensured a system that is dependent not on a particular specialized discipline that may fade away over time, but on the broader understanding of a science fed by younger students who can challenge the dogma. It ensured the longevity of the institute. “I was quite convinced right from the beginning, that an institute structure doesn’t last for a long time anywhere in the world,” he said. “But the university structure has lasted for centuries.” 5-Knowledge-PS1 NCBS has had a pretty rigorous course structure since it began. In November 1995, MK Mathew, a faculty member at NCBS, shared the guidelines to graduate work at NCBS at a steering committee meeting. It included plans for coursework, and check systems for students on their path to getting a PhD, including comprehensive exams and thesis defence. These are shown in the audio slideshow below. Along with Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, Mathew has been teaching a biochemistry course since 1992. It has gained quite a bit of notoriety in the student population over the years. In the audio excerpt, he shares some stories from the course, and why he thinks students might be scared of the course. 5-Knowledge-A0 5-Knowledge-PS4 Another aspect to probe is the connection between a graduate research institute like NCBS and the research-world experience of incoming students. NCBS does not exist in isolation. Students coming into the Centre come from colleges across the country, and with, few exceptions, minimal exposure to a research environment. There is a disconnect between an NCBS and the system where it recruits students from. This is a broader failure of the Indian scientific community in the natural sciences, says Satyajit Rath, a faculty member at the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Listen to his interview clip where he assesses the connections between places like NCBS and NII to undergraduate teaching centres. 5-Knowledge-A4 Also see the documentary excerpt below on what Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, thinks could be a good way to go beyond TIFR and extend Homi Bhabha’s legacy. 5-Knowledge-V1 Which leaves us with the question, what after the PhD. The question is vast, but it is a pressing one for many students entering the system. The unsaid assumption has always been the academic career path. But that’s not always possible. There just aren’t enough such positions. It’s not a question that NCBS focused its attention on in the first two decades, says L Shashidhara, an early post doctoral researcher at NCBS and current IISER faculty member. He adds that the what-after-PhD quandary is a failure of all institutions. In his interview, Shashidhara shares some of the ways in which his institute, IISER, is trying to address this issue. 5-Knowledge-A3 5-Knowledge-PS2 For more, check out the Gallery where students and faculty share views on plagiarism in Indian science, on the history of coursework at NCBS, on childhood inflection points toward science, on student selection processes, and on finding the right match of student and area of research. 5-Mentor-P1 The lab notebook from 2008 that KS Madhumala is flipping through looks more like a printed book that just happens to be in a cursive font on ruled pages. Blemishes are really hard to come by. The first note from November 8, 2008: “CS and rut2080 exposed to 20 % EB and paraffin oil”. A control, wild type Drosophila, and rut2080, a Drosophila mutant, are exposed to (E)thyl (B)utyrate. “Volume measurement is in progress,” it says, in the present tense. One gets the sense that the notebook is a transcript of her lab work. KS Madhumala, an NCBS post doctoral researcher, keeps flipping past the pages. It occurs to her, then, that one of the reasons Veronica Rodrigues, an NCBS faculty member at the time, took her on as a student was because of her lab notes. Rodrigues was obsessed about note taking, she says. 5-Mentors-A1 Mitradas Panicker, an NCBS faculty member, remembers the time he spent as a summer student at TIFR in PK Maitra’s lab as a transformative one. 5-Mentors-A4 Jayant Udgaonkar, another NCBS faculty member, also regards Maitra as an early inspiration. “Professor Maitra had a deep impact on me in terms of his intellect, his enthusiasm for science,” he says in an interview earlier this year. Taslimarif Saiyed laughs when he remembers Obaid Siddiqi’s dislike for Excel. Graphs were to be plotted by hand in the early 2000s, when he was a student in Siddiqi’s lab. This was graduate research. But Siddiqi would teach him how to hold a pencil, Saiyed says. Just so Saiyed could draw curves better. That Siddiqi was fastidious was fairly legendary. But there was some method in this particular madness. This was about getting a feel of a trend, about getting the most meaningful understanding of, in this case, behaviour of Drosophila. 5-Mentors-A2 Vidita Vaidya, a TIFR faculty member, is just grateful there was someone like KS Krishnan when she joined TIFR. It was like being “taken under his wing”, she says. In a separate conversation, Maithreyi Narasimha, another TIFR faculty member, utters exactly the same words. “Krishnan just gave me half his equipment,” says Vaidya. “A large part of (my) first year was just walking into his office and being given stuff.” She remarks in her interview that what sticks in her mind is the “utter generosity of spirit” displayed by Krishnan and Rodrigues. 5-Mentors-A0 5-Mentor-PS4 People shape people. This chapter looks at the small and big influences of PK Maitra, KS Krishnan, Veronica Rodrigues and Obaid Siddiqi on members of the TIFR/NCBS biology community. Also check out the video clip narrated by Mani Ramaswami, a faculty member at Trinity College. He shares a story that PK Maitra liked to tell people, of a debate between Maitra and Siddiqi, and indicative of Siddiqi’s positive outlook. 5-Mentors-V1 The slideshows contain selected photos and documents connected to the four scientists, including an interesting recollection regarding Siddiqi from John Carlson, who came to the TIFR Molecular Biology Unit (MBU) in the 1980s to learn about olfaction in Drosophila. 5-Mentors-PS1 Conversations about mentors tend toward adulation, as time and distance softens and smoothens memories. But not always. Vaidya concedes that perhaps a quarter of what Krishnan donated her was not really useful. But that was okay – the rest made up for it. And listen to the interview excerpt of Kaleem Siddiqi, a professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He shares a more practical difficulty from years ago when he was in middle school in Bombay and needed the help of his father, Obaid Siddiqi, in some school assignments. Obaid Siddiqi was just not deep into mathematics. “He really couldn’t answer any of those questions,” says Siddiqi of his father. “He had no concept.” It was just not his thing. 5-Mentors-A5 Siddiqi was also notorious for not publishing much. A paper worth publishing was one that really probed the thinking of a field, he would tell one of his last PhD students, Mohammed bin Abu Baker. On the other hand, Rodrigues was known for striking fear into the hearts of her younger colleagues, exhorting them to publish and apply for grants. Champakali Ayyub, a scientific officer at TIFR, discusses her views on her “elder sister”. 5-Mentors-A3 For more, see the Gallery. There’s a copy of a 1993 letter from Rodrigues to Ayyub that elaborates on her publishing philosophy. And Siddiqi reflects on one of his teachers, Riayat Khan. Table Of Contents A list of subunits of the resource. Building Knowledge, On Mentorship Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Sound Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource taslim_OS-pencil-hold_EDUCATION-MENTOR Description An account of the resource Taslimarif Saiyed, former NCBS student and current director, C-CAMP: Memories of being a student in Obaid Siddiqi's lab and the art of holding a pencil. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource NCBS Archives 5-Mentor-A2