Mukund Thattai

The Search for the First Multicellular Lifeform

Scientists are interested in the unicellular ancestors of plants, fungi and animals because they want to know if each transition into multicellularity was driven by similar evolutionary forces.

The Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is famous for its disappearing act: parts of its body vanish one by one until nothing remains but its ethereal grin. Scientists attempting to retrace the evolution of animals confront something equally curious. One might assume that going ever further back in evolutionary time, recently-evolved animal traits would drop away until a sort of ‘minimal animal’ remained. However, a growing body of data suggests that this minimal animal may not be an animal at all. Instead, sophisticated cellular processes once thought to be exclusive to animals are found across several unicellular eukaryotes: grins without (multicellular) cats!

So how do scientists reconstruct the deep history of multicellularity? The record for the oldest multicellular organism to be studied directly belongs to plants grown from 30,000-year-old seeds preserved in permafrost (Yashina et al., 2012). However, multicellular life is much older than this. Fossils of multicellular red algae have been dated to 1.6 billion years ago (Bengtson et al., 2017), and fossils of multicellular fungi date from about a billion years ago (Loron et al., 2019).

The oldest confidently-dated animal fossils are about half a billion years old (Bobrovskiy et al., 2018). Multicellularity arose independently in plants, fungi and animals (Brunet and King, 2017). Scientists are interested in the unicellular ancestors of these groups because they want to know if each transition into multicellularity was driven by similar evolutionary forces. Unfortunately, fossils reveal little about the cell biology of these primordial organisms.

Charles Darwin was well aware of this challenge. To reconstruct the evolutionary history of an organism, he wrote in On the Origin of Species, “we ought to look exclusively to its lineal ancestors; but this is scarcely ever possible and we are forced in each case to look to … the collateral descendants from the same original parent-form.” That is, one must hope the traits of surviving organisms reveal those of their extinct ancestors.

Researchers now know that Darwin’s idea of “living fossils” was too simplistic. No organism remains entirely identical to its ancestor: genetic mutations constantly accumulate, driven by conflict, competition, and random chance. Nevertheless, one could hope to reconstruct the ancestor using a patchwork of different ancestral traits preserved across different surviving descendants.

A central theme of the emerging field of evolutionary cell biology is to study organisms that provide as much information as possible about the past. One way to do this is to develop new model organisms based on their position in the tree of life. As the evolution of animals is retraced, an ancestral unicellular species at the very threshold of multicellularity will eventually be reached. It is possible this species has no surviving descendants other than the animals themselves. To find more collateral descendants, one must push further back in time. The better life’s existing diversity is sampled, the more likely that a species will be found similar to the ancestors scientists want to reconstruct.

The billion-year-old clade known as Holozoa consists of animals and closely related unicellular species, including choanoflagellates, filastereans, and ichthyosporeans. Just a decade ago this was a sparsely sampled region of the eukaryotic tree. For example, the first choanoflagellate genome was only published in 2008 (Brunet and King, 2017). Today dozens of holozoan species have been cultured, sequenced, and studied, and they are a fertile hunting ground for interesting cell biology.

Codosiga sp. isolated from Siberian subsoil. This is a species of flagellate eukaryote of the choanoflagellate class and Codosiga genus. Photo: Daniel Stoupin/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Importantly, the non-animal holozoans include species that can become transiently multicellular, at certain times or under certain conditions. Specifically, some choanoflagellates and ichthyosporeans have clonal multicellular life stages, while some filastereans form multicellular aggregates. But are these behaviours homologous to multicellularity in animals, and therefore representative of the ancestral state? Or are they examples of convergent evolution, driven by adaptations to similar environments?

One way to answer these questions is to resolve the molecular mechanisms that enable multicellular behaviour across holozoans. Suggestively, holozoan genomes encode transcription factors and cell adhesion genes known to be essential for animal multicellularity, but the roles of these genes had not been directly demonstrated (Grau-Bové et al., 2017; Richter et al., 2018). Now, two independent teams have reported the results of studies on certain animal-like behaviours in unicellular lineages that shed light on the evolution of animal multicellularity.

Non-animal species in the clade Holozoa exhibit coordinated contractions dependent on actomyosin complexes similar to those observed in modern animals. Caption and image: eLife 2019;8:e52805

In a paper in eLife, Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo and co-workers from Barcelona, Liverpool, Oslo, Shizuoka and Hiroshima – including Omaya Dudin and Andrej Ondracka as joint first authors – report how reproduction in an ichthyosporean called Sphaeroforma arctica involves a stage of growth that is reminiscent of the embryonic development of fruit flies. The nucleus of an initial single cell divides repeatedly to form a polarised epithelial layer, which then gives rise to multiple cells as its membrane undergoes coordinated invaginations (Dudin et al., 2019).

In a second paper in Science, Nicole King and co-workers from Berkeley and Amsterdam – including Thibaut Brunet, Ben Larson and Tess Linden as joint first authors – report the results of a study on a newly isolated choanoflagellate which they name Choanoeca flexa (Brunet et al., 2019). In bright light, this organism exists as a cup-shaped colony of cells, with their flagella pointing inwards. In the dark, however, the cup flips inside-out via a collective cellular contraction. This collective contraction is reminiscent of the contractions that generate curvature in developing animal tissues.

Both studies use imaging and pharmacological inhibition to demonstrate that these multicellular processes depend on the same molecular machinery: complexes of actin and myosin that can generate mechanical forces within cells. These results suggest that the last common ancestor of holozoans was an organism that was capable of transient multicellularity, with cells that could contract collectively. Among its descendants, only the animals evolved a permanently multicellular lifestyle, using the power of collective contraction to sculpt tissues and generate the “endless forms most beautiful” that so inspired Darwin.

This article was originally published by the journal eLife and has been republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Mukund Thattai is a member of the faculty of the National Centre for Biological Sciences, a part of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. His research focuses on the evolution of complex cells.

A Billion Candles: Is There an Indian Way of Doing Science?

Mukund Thattai examines the steady growth of the All India People’s Science Network and the decline of India’s universities in search of reasons to remain hopeful about how, and why, India conducts its research.

It is a truism that basic research leads to technological and economic progress. Governments and the public have come to see all of science through the lens of applications. This is short-sighted: in a democracy, science is a public good for a multitude of reasons.

The astronomer and author Carl Sagan spoke of science as a candle in the dark: a way to push back ignorance and uncertainty, a way to discover truths about our world and chart our way forward.

In the wake of the Bhopal gas leak of 1984, reacting to the horror of the most deadly industrial disaster in history, a collection of grassroots groups across India assembled to talk about the future. These groups, some of whom had existed for decades, were dedicated to spreading awareness of science and its fruits, in schools and town halls, through street theatre performances and in vernacular media. Their members, mainly non-scientists, were driven by conscience and idealism. They saw a role for science in the literacy and anti-superstition efforts of the era, but also knew the limits of a science divorced from society.

In 1988, they came together to form the All India People’s Science Network, perhaps unique in the world in its reach and depth. The network continues to be active today, teaching and popularising science, mobilising thousands of people in cities and villages, intervening in public discussions about issues ranging from genetic modification to forest loss.

This is one way in which the flame of science burns in contemporary India. Yet it’s not the aspect we usually talk about.

Stories about Indian science tend to focus on big-bang contributions. We’re told about the ancient invention of zero, the linguistics of Panini, the medical treatises of Charaka and the astronomical calculations of Aryabhata. A parallel technological narrative runs from ancient textiles and rustproof metalwork to modern armaments such as the Mysorean rockets used by Tipu Sultan against British East India Company forces. We celebrate the work of Srinivasa Ramanujan, J.C. Bose and C. V. Raman in British India.

Stories of science in independent India are no different. The Green Revolution of the 1960s, which increased India’s agricultural capacity manifold, made M.S. Swaminathan and Norman Borlaug household names. India’s pride at being able to loft spacecraft to Earth, Moon and Mars orbit has made heroes of the men behind the Indian Space Research Organisation, Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was India’s “Missile Man” and later the president of the country. Homi Bhabha was revered throughout India’s scientific and political establishment. It was through his efforts that the country eventually joined the club of nuclear powers in 1974.

But these singular achievements are not universally celebrated. The genesis of the All India People’s Science Network echoed the traumatic experiences of a previous generation, when the Hiroshima bomb triggered mass movements against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The Green Revolution has all but petered out: growth in agricultural yield is slowing, India’s farmland is increasingly too saline to be usable, and the total cultivable area is dropping.

The country now faces irreversible environmental degradation and loss of wildlife, a water crisis with no solution in sight, and massive displacements of people, all as a consequence of the post-independence push towards industrialisation. This is the people’s history of Indian science, and it stands in direct contrast to the great-man narrative.

Panini is known as the “father of linguistics”; Aryabhata, the “father of astronomy”; Swaminathan, the “father of the Green Revolution”; Sarabhai, the “father of India’s space program”; and Bhabha, the “father of India’s nuclear program”. Indian science has many fathers – but no mothers to speak of and a billion neglected children.

Credit: Lau Rey/Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0

Why does India support science as a publicly-funded enterprise? The country’s total expenditure on research, including contributions from industry, has for years held steady at about 0.7% of GDP according to the Indian government’s Economic Survey of 2018. This is much lower than the 2-3% of GDP that China, the US or Germany spend. However, India’s rate of public investment in research is 0.5% of GDP, comparable to that of more wealthy countries.

Investments on this scale can only be politically justified if they are targeted toward areas of national importance, such as defence, agriculture and health. What about the argument for public investment in more basic research? This is often based on Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report to the US government, ‘Science, the Endless Frontier’. Bush knew that the Manhattan Project and other major scientific achievements of the US war effort relied on apparently useless discoveries of earlier decades. He argued that basic research would yield sustained technological and economic dividends, and therefore should be supported by public funds.

Enlightenment science in the West, with its curiosity-driven ideal, was conducted by a small set of men who enjoyed the patronage of the wealthy or the monarchy. It later borrowed the trappings of academic rigour from philosophers and historians: practices such as the sharing of work in learned societies, peer review of research findings, and formal apprenticeship of students in universities. During the Industrial Revolution, science continued within the walls of academia while technology progressed through the labours of practical men in the outside world.

However, as scientific predictions became more reliable and therefore useful to the process of invention, science and technology started to intertwine. This process culminated in the massive projects of World War II, giving us radar, transistors, computers, atomic energy and Bush’s fateful social contract. The hyphenation of science and technology as S&T has never been reversed since. In the post-war era, governments have become the single largest funders of science across the world.

In newly-independent India, science was practiced within universities, in the new engineering-centric teaching institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), in the application-oriented laboratories of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), and in basic research institutes such as the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). Some of these, including most of the universities, had existed prior to Indian independence. Each had developed within its own unique circumstances and context.

But these separate histories soon began to be erased as the administration of science and education in India moved inexorably towards uniformity. Since academic positions enjoyed relatively stable funding, science grew professionalised. It became a viable and sought-after career path for increasing numbers of people. In exchange for this stability, scientists ceded control of the research agenda. National missions such as weather forecasting, agriculture, the atomic program, myriad massive engineering projects and the expansion of India’s human resources, set the direction for India’s growing scientific cadre.

Now, after seven decades of public investment, the government is asking what has been achieved.

Credit: Global Partnership for Education/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

February 28, the anniversary of the day C.V. Raman discovered the effect for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, is celebrated as India’s National Science Day. Writing in the Hindustan Times on the occasion this year, K. VijayRaghavan, now India’s principal scientific advisor, made the case for public investment in “blue skies” research. VijayRaghavan, an accomplished basic scientist himself and the former director of the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, echoed Vannevar Bush as he wrote about the benefits accrued from curiosity-driven research in India: Shambhu Nath De’s work on cholera toxin and G.N. Ramachandran’s seminal contributions to structural biology. He argued that much more could be expected if the right investments, incentives and institutional environments were put in place.

Unfortunately, this narrative starts from the premise that the only justification for public funding of science is the promise of eventual applications. This gives a flawed impression of the way science works, creates unrealistic expectations and setting funders at odds with researchers. Major Indian science funding agencies, including the CSIR, the Department of Science and Technology, the Department of Biotechnology and the Department of Atomic Energy, are under pressure to deliver on applications. Basic-research scientists are forced to shelter behind Bush’s fragile syllogism: “Our collective work may not be useful now, but history tells us it will be someday; my own work is not useful now, so there is a chance it might be someday.”

Eventually that ‘someday’ becomes today. Judged by the very yardsticks scientists themselves have put forward, Indian science has done little for the Indian people.

The Indian scientific establishment can no longer take unquestioning public support for granted. The case of the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) is revealing. In development for nearly two decades by a consortium of institutions including TIFR, the INO is a proposed detector shielded deep within a mountain to study the properties of fundamental particles called neutrinos. The project has a strong scientific justification, raises no safety concerns and has recently been granted an environmental clearance. Yet the effort has been dogged by claims that it will affect human health and harm forest and farm lands. Though the INO team has worked closely with the people who live around the mountain and nearby forested areas, they are accused of ignoring the sentiments of the local community.

False rumours spread faster than attempts by scientists to address them. Why do these stories have so much traction? Why is it so easy to paint scientists in a bad light? Sadly, the INO is a victim of previous failures in which precisely these kinds of lapses did occur: in which scientists ignored environmental issues or local sentiments. Such concerns are not restricted to India. The Thirty-Meter Telescope proposed to be built on Mauna Kea in Hawaii has met with strong protests from native Hawaiians who feel it would violate one of their most sacred spaces.

Across the world, public spending on esoteric scientific projects has always faced resistance, not just from the people but also from politicians. In 1969, Robert Wilson, the first director of Fermilab, was asked by a US Congressional Committee whether his expensive particle accelerator had any security applications. He replied: “It has nothing to do with defending our country, except to make it worth defending”. Wilson was arguing that there are deep and important reasons to fund science, beyond its much-touted capacity to generate technological progress. The science-for-applications framework was articulated through negotiations between the scientific community and the government, each side driven by its own narrow and self-serving logic. It’s time to ask people – not scientists, not the government but the people – why, if at all, science makes a positive contribution to their lives.

Contrast the slow but steady growth of the grassroots All India People’s Science Network with the precipitous decline of India’s government-supported universities and the under-performance of its research establishment. The longevity of the network is the result of many factors: the drive and dedication of its members, who see science as an instrument of broader change; the diversity of its activities, bubbling up from the preoccupations and motivations of its various constituencies; the diffuseness of its structure, each of its sub-groups having grown organically within a local context. I believe there are valuable lessons here on how to reimagine science in India, a deeply-rooted science worthy of public support.

What kind of science would this be?

Credit: Biswarup Ganguly/Wikimedia Commons

A science that inspires. There is a strong case to fund science for the same reason we fund the arts or sport. Science is a cultural activity: it reveals unexpected beauty in the everyday; it captures the imagination of children; it attempts to answer some of humanity’s biggest questions about where we came from. Moreover, scientific ideas can be a potent component of the process by which society arrives at collective decisions about the future. Among the strongest reasons a resource-limited country such as India should fund curiosity-driven science is that the nature of future crises cannot be predicted.

It is impossible to micromanage the long-term research agenda, so the only hope is to cast a wide net. A broad and deep scientific community is a valuable resource that can be called upon to give its inputs on a variety of issues. They cannot be expected to always deliver a solution but can be expected to provide the best possible information available at any time. In this consultative process, it is crucially important to not privilege scientific experts over other participants in the discussion.

A diverse and democratic science. Science thrives within a diversity of questions and methods, a diversity of institutional environments, and a diversity of personal experiences of individual scientists. In the modern era, the practice of science has moved to a more democratic mode, away from the idea of lone geniuses and towards a collective effort of creating hypotheses and sharing results. Any tendency toward uniformity and career professionalisation dilutes and ultimately destroys this diversity. As historian of science Dhruv Raina describes it, a science that is vulnerable to the “pressures of government” is “no longer an open frontier of critical activity”. Instead, science must become “social and reflexive”.

Ideas and themes must bubble up from the broadest possible community. In India, access to such a process is limited by the accident of one’s mother tongue and social class, and this must change. Anyone who wants to should have the opportunity to understand what scientists are doing. Ultimately, this must involve not only scientists but also social scientists, historians, philosophers, artists and communicators – and the public at large.

A science that is locally rooted. Is there such a thing as an “Indian way” of doing science? Science in the abstract is said to transcend national boundaries. In practice it is strongly influenced by local experiences and local history. Unfortunately, even as national missions have faded to the background, they have been replaced by an imitation of Western fashions. It has become common to look to high-profile journals and conferences as arbiters of questions worth asking. This must stop. The key to revitalising Indian science is the careful choice of rich questions. These questions could be driven by new national missions that bring the excitement of a collective effort. Or they could be inspired by observing the complex interactions of the world immediately around us.

There is a great deal of scholarship and scientific inquiry that can arise from the study of India’s traditional knowledge systems. The country’s enormous biodiversity and human genetic diversity are an exciting and bottomless source of scientific puzzles and important secrets. Such questions would allow for a deeper two-way engagement with India’s people. This is not to say Indian scientists cannot work on internationally important problems – quite the opposite. The scientific community in India, working within their own unique contexts, could become the source of important problems that anyone in the world would be excited to work on.

A science that builds global connections. The internationalisation of science is an important goal in and of itself. While it stimulates cross-fertilisation of ideas and pushes up standards within science, it also creates opportunities for broader global discussions and engagements. The unfortunate hurdles which curtail the ability of Indian academics and students to travel abroad, and the enormous difficulty foreign academics face in obtaining necessary permissions to visit their colleagues in India, serve no purpose. In spite of all this, there is a healthy trend towards stronger international links.

Major global science funding agencies such as the Wellcome Trust and European Molecular Biology Organisation directly fund research within India. And while India’s current capacity to train its young scientists is slowly improving, Indian students are exposed to excellent opportunities abroad. The US National Science Foundation estimates there are nearly 9,000 Indian students enrolled in science and engineering PhD programs in the US alone, with thousands more spread across the world. This is a substantial fraction of the 76,000 students presently enrolled in such programs in India, according to the Ministry of Human Resource Development’s 2017 Survey.

Young Indian scholars abroad represent India to the world. They build links to productive academic and research networks, are trained in cutting edge disciplines and generate new scientific output – all while maintaining close ties to home.

A science that renews itself and passes on its values. Academic scientists have long played dual roles as teachers and researchers. Within India, science has a remarkably broad appeal. Public science talks are standing-room-only affairs, and famous scientists receive the kind of adulation typically reserved for movie stars. Students across the country are excited about science. Many aspire to become scientists themselves.

Historically, engineering and medical colleges have attracted scientifically-minded students, but this is changing. The Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research have now been running undergraduate programs for over a decade in cities across India. These institutions are to science what the IITs are to engineering, attracting some of the brightest students each year. Science programs within public universities have not fared as well, and must seize every opportunity to reinvent themselves. A science curriculum based not on dry facts but on the history and process of discovery can form the base of a broad education, in conjunction with the humanities and the arts.

These are just some of the reasons I believe science in India deserves public support. Every so often, the work of basic scientists has led to useful applications. But there are enough instances in which actual harm has been done in the name of science. We cannot be so naïve as to claim innocence; we must take some responsibility for this and participate fully in correcting it. This does not mean overturning our lives and institutional structures.

For a start, it means we must be open to ideas and criticism, sensitive to the consequences of our work, more integrally connected to the complex society around us. Words from the 1983 essay ‘Toward a People’s Science Movement’ by historian Mahesh Rangarajan and other remain relevant today: “Science and technology has been getting alienated from the people, their understanding and knowledge, life experiences and problems.”

It is time that every Indian, and people everywhere, are able to carry the candle of science in a way that brings meaning to each of their lives.

This essay was originally written for a forthcoming publication of the Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard University, focusing on science and South Asia.

Mukund Thattai is a member of the faculty of the National Centre for Biological Sciences, a part of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. His research focuses on the evolution of complex cells. The views expressed here are his own. He can be reached by email and on Twitter.

Teaching v. Research: Don’t Let a Flawed Experiment Kill a Good Idea

By instituting a top-down assessment scheme without concomitant support on the ground, the UGC conducted an experiment that was doomed to fail – and now threatens to take a good idea down with it.

Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar. Credit: PTI

This article is part of the ‘Let Teachers Teach’ series, discussing the Union human resource development ministry’s decision to not mandate college teachers to conduct research.

Mukund Thattai is a scientist at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru.

‘Mission creep’ refers to a situation in which the objectives of a project are not clearly defined, and therefore continually vary over time. Mission creep makes planning ahead difficult, and moreover makes it impossible to say whether a project has succeeded at all. To avoid this, one must constantly recall the original goals of any undertaking. In this light, let us examine Human Resource Development (HRD) minister Prakash Javadekar’s announcement of July 30, 2017: that research would no longer be a promotion criterion for college teachers.

In 2010 the University Grants Commission (UGC) instituted Academic Performance Indicators (APIs) as a way to assess the research and teaching output of college teachers and university lecturers. This meant that teachers were required to conduct research, guide students and publish in academic journals in order to be eligible for jobs and promotions. This led to unintended, though entirely foreseeable, consequences, kicking off an arms race between academics and the UGC. Shoddy research and academic misconduct spiked, while predatory pay-to-publish journals proliferated. The UGC pushed back by notifying a whitelist of “approved” journals. Shockingly, this whitelist contained over 38,000 journals, of which at least 82 were known predatory journals.

Now, the predatory journals are using the UGC’s stamp of approval to lure beleaguered teachers to publish with them (for example, the International Journal of Engineering Sciences and Research Technology, a known predatory journal, prominently highlights the UGC logo on its website). To see the long-term consequences of these policies, we might look to Pakistan, which in 2002 imposed a research mandate on its lecturers and now struggles to contain a shady “research mafia”. The HRD minister’s announcement is an admission that the status quo is untenable, that something needs to be done.

What was the UGC trying to achieve with APIs in the first place? Surely the primary goal must have been to improve the standards of teaching in colleges. There is a widespread belief that teaching and research benefit from one another and that research ought to be an ingredient of any academic environment. Talk to any scientist and she will tell you a story of a great teacher who motivated her and the first research project that inspired her. Teachers who do research are better aware of new developments and better able to inculcate the scientific temper among their students. Conversely, many scientists (including this author) will tell you how teaching duties have influenced their own research in entirely positive ways.

Flawed implementation

However, critics of the API scheme point out that research does not happen in a vacuum: it requires a fertile academic environment, access to literature and laboratory infrastructure, of course, and adequate funding. Moreover, it is only a minority of college students who envision a future in academia; most do not greatly benefit from being exposed to a research setting. Finally, the actual outcomes of forcing college teachers to do research under difficult conditions are the diametric opposite of the desired goal: increased research fraud and misconduct and poorer teaching outcomes from overburdened teachers. Therefore, it appears that the HRD minister’s decision was the right one: the push to APIs and mandated research in colleges has failed.

Let us address each of the criticisms in turn.

First: If lack of infrastructure and funding are obstacles, we should fix these issues rather than abandon our original goals. By instituting a top-down assessment scheme without concomitant support on the ground, the UGC conducted an experiment that was doomed to fail. Sadly, many will interpret this to mean that the goal of integrating teaching and research was itself flawed. It might therefore be a long time before such an experiment is tried again. If it ever is, we must ensure that inputs from teachers themselves are incorporated at the earliest stages. This is the key to success.

Second: It is true that most college students do not go on to have academic careers. But there is a virtuous cycle in which students with a talent for research later become teachers who impart the values of research. We should take great care not to break that cycle. The undergraduate programmes of the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) demonstrate the calibre of students trained in a research-focused curriculum, whether they go on to become academics, engineers or entrepreneurs. By giving up on research exposure at the undergraduate level, over time we risk devaluing research at all levels.

Third: There are many examples of teachers at undergraduate colleges who successfully balance teaching and research. Researchers in the humanities and social sciences often support themselves by taking up teaching-heavy jobs. Even in the natural sciences, where there is a sharper separation between teaching-centric colleges and research-centric universities and institutes, many will start their careers in colleges and later shift to universities. For this to be possible, teachers must maintain a research programme from the very beginning of their careers. By constantly shifting the duties of teachers and researchers, first by instituting the API system and later by rescinding it, the UGC has made these types of career progressions difficult to manage.

So, it is possible to support the cause of research in colleges while being critical of the manner in which the APIs were implemented. This is a classic case of mission creep: making sudden top-down changes rather than organically working towards a set of clear, well-defined goals.

Listening to teachers

Finally, we must not forget the point of view of the teachers themselves. In this discussion, there is hardly any acknowledgement that teachers are people too, who go through personal struggles and make sacrifices. We must strive to attract the very best people into this most important of professions to keep them motivated and to support them as they work in unforgiving environments.

Nandita Jayaraj, a science journalist, reached out to college teachers across the country for their opinions. Many support the move to do away with APIs. Surya Harikrishnan (assistant professor, Manipal University) feels the API system “was putting extra load on the teachers and distracting them from their primary duty, which is teaching.” Asha Abraham (a biotechnologist at a college in Mangalore) said, “Research is something that should come up on its own and not be imposed. I have seen the harmful effects of mandatory research all around.” Aruna Naorem (assistant professor, University of Delhi) is more emphatic: “They should never have introduced this grading system in the first place. It’s ruining the whole academic atmosphere, either teaching or research.”

However, others despair that Javadekar’s announcement sends a signal that research is not valued. According to Smitha Hegde (professor, Nitte University Centre for Science Education and Research, Mangalore), “Just when we are thinking that the government is interested in quality education by bringing in pedagogy-based research, [the minister’s announcement] comes as a rude shock … The ‘burden’ of research will be relieved by increasing the number of quality teachers and not by lowering the standards.”

Abraham added, “I know several college teachers who do research because it’s their passion. … These teachers carry out research as additional work, after carrying out their normal teaching workload.”

Bikram Phookun, a faculty member of St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi, and currently teaching at Ashoka University, Sonepat, agrees: “I don’t think it is reasonable, given the teaching load, the facilities and the environment in most Indian undergraduate institutions, to require research of teachers working in them. On the other hand, in spite of the obstacles, some exceptionally motivated undergraduate teachers do manage to engage in fruitful research; … it would be a pity if their drive and resourcefulness were not acknowledged.”

Teachers who were genuinely interested and engaged in academic research are ostensibly not affected by the new system since they are not prevented from doing research. “It’s their choice,” as Javadekar has said. Indeed, it is not clear such teachers were in fact better off in the old system. Previously, the level of research was typically low, fraud was common and true research was not overtly valued. Pervez Hoodbhoy, writing in Dawn, states the equivalent under Pakistan’s research-mandated system: “Many young [academics] lose heart when incompetent colleagues race ahead in promotions, receive wads of cash for publishing junk papers, rise to top administrative positions, and be nominated for national awards and prizes.”

As soon as you make a checklist, you have created a system that can be gamed. Then again, the issue has to do with the top-down nature of the API system – whereas a more local and organic system may well have succeeded.

All kinds to make an institution

So how can we preserve the important benefits of mixing teaching and research in colleges? Phookun feels that “change is certainly possible: it may well be reasonable at some time in the future to expect the typical undergraduate teacher to engage fruitfully in research – but only if the appropriate circumstances are created.”

Two steps come to mind:

1. Promote teaching, research and outreach at an institutional level rather than at an individual level. Institutions have diverse faculty, some of whom are interested in teaching, some in research and some in outreach or science communication. Forcing all faculty in a research-centric institution to teach produces poor teachers. Forcing all scientists to do science outreach produces boring outreach efforts. And we have already seen what happens if all faculty of a teaching-centric institution are forced to do research. But there are plenty of ways for faculty to get involved in these distinct functions – perhaps by providing administrative support, developing curricula, raising funds, so on. Explicitly promoting teaching, research and outreach sends a strong message that such efforts are valued.

2. The second step is to provide funding and procedural support for those college teachers who wish to pursue research. The MD/PhD programmes make for good models to emulate. Though physician training primarily deals with the practice of medicine, many doctors are interested in and motivated by fundamental research. Such individuals apply for prestigious research grants. These grants provide funding and allow physicians to negotiate with their host institutions for protected research time. This not only says that research is abstractly valued but also provides the resources to support good research.

The biologist E. O. Wilson wrote in his book Letters to a Young Scientist (2013):

University faculties consist of both ‘inside professors,’ who enjoy work that involves close social interactions with other faculty members and take justifiable pride in their service to the institution, and ‘outside professors,’ whose social interactions are primarily with fellow researchers. Outside professors are light on committee work but earn their keep another way: they bring in a flow of new ideas and talent and they add prestige and income proportionate to the amount and quality of their discoveries.

In other words: it takes all kinds to sustain an institution. Teaching, research and outreach all make positive contributions, and each individual must contribute in her own way.

Note: This essay is an outcome of a discussion on Twitter involving Shuba Desikan (science journalist, The Hindu), Vikram Gopal (journalist, Hindustan Times), Nandita Jayaraj (science journalist), Vasudevan Mukunth (science editor, The Wire), Pushkar (director, The International Centre Goa), Rahul Siddharthan (scientist, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai) and the author. Thanks to Nandita Jayaraj for her critical inputs and to all the teachers who agreed to be quoted. This article and all quotations therein reflect the personal opinions of the author and of the quoted individuals. They do not necessarily express the views of the institutions to which they are affiliated.