Biologist Chandrima Shaha will head the 30-member council that will take over on January 1, 2020.
New Delhi: Biologist Chandrima Shaha will become the first woman to head the Indian National Science Academy (INSA). Shaha, 66, was previously the vice-president of INSA and the director of the National Institute of Immunology in Delhi.
Speaking to The Hindu and The Print, Shaha said during her tenure as president of the academy, she will prioritise communicating science “aggressively” and combat pseudoscience. She and the elected council of 30 members will take charge on January 1, 2020.
Before her turn as a biologist, Shaha was cricketer and also worked as a commentator for All India Radio. Cricket taught her the value of team work, she told the The Hindu.
Shaha’s research focused on understanding cell death pathways. Her laboratory has worked on finding the precise mechanisms of cell death and how this process is regulated by “diverse signalling pathways” in unicellular (Leishmania parasite) and multicellular (cancer cells) models. The Leishmania parasite can cause kala-azar. Understanding how these cells die can help kill treat the diseases they can cause.
“The aim is to provide a deeper understanding of cell death events that can help in the development of improved therapeutics for diseases associated with anomalous cell death,” her profile on the National Institute of Immunology website says.
Promoting science and tackling myths
Shaha told The Print that she wants to encourage “collaborations between scientists of different fields” to tackle issues through a multi-disciplinary approach.
To promote science, Shaha said she would like to conduct more outreach in local languages. She would like to “have scientists speak about their work, the process of science etc to wider audiences,” she told The Hindu. The president-elect, who completed her doctoral research in 1980 from the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, said that while government initiatives have “given a push towards innovations”, the “learning system is not designed to encourage research”.
She said communicating science to a large audience will also help battle myths. “This is critical to address myth and misinformation. We have to educate people from the bottom-up,” she told The Hindu.
When The Hindu quizzed her about the inadequate representation of women in the scientific field, Shaha opposed the idea of reservation for women. She said that there were not enough “good women candidates” for research fellowships in India’s science academies, and seemed to suggest that quotas would “dilute standards”.
“While there are several more young women scientists today who are good and deserving, we cannot dilute [academic and research] standards just to accommodate more women. India has several opportunities for women scientists perhaps more than several countries. However, we need to do better at assessing these programmes and evaluating their effectiveness and execution,” she told the newspaper.
Nandita Jayaraj, the co-founder of science media platform The Life of Science, told The Wire that such ideas shield institutes from addressing the gender imbalance. “The idea that there is a shortage of excellent women candidates to choose from has shielded institutes from their gender balance responsibilities for far too long. Surely there are enough women in science in India today to warrant more representation than 10% women at higher levels, and I think Dr Shaha would agree with this,” she said.
Jayaraj also said that Shah is not the first person to repeat the ‘we cannot dilute academic standards to accommodate more minorities’ argument. “However, as someone in this position, as someone who has said that diversity is important for science, I am disappointed,” she told The Wire.
The woman had alleged that the professor had made several sexually coloured remarks and relentless phone calls to her late at night.
New Delhi: The science community has not been immune to the #MeToo movement that picked up speed in India in October. This month, a PhD student at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, had complained that a senior academic had sexually harassed her.
According to reports, an internal committee took immediate cognisance of the complaint and stressed that “IISc has always taken strong action”. The woman had alleged that the professor had made several sexually coloured remarks and relentless phone calls to her late at night.
The professor against whom the allegations have been made, who cannot be named because of IISc’s internal policy, has a doctoral degree from the US and is a recipient of the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, and is a J.C. Bose National Fellow.
“He is listed among the top 1% of scientists by the (research platform) ISI Web of Knowledge and is serving in senior editorial capacities across several top-rated science journals,” an Economic Timesreport said.
The academic at the centre of the storm in the prestigious institute has been associated with IISc since 1998. According to ET, his scientific work has “resulted in more than 500 publications, 15,000 citations and an h-index of 55, the highest among all engineering faculty in India”.
When members of the council were contacted, a few reportedly said that the decision on the issue had been taken almost two weeks ago, but they refused to divulge what action would be taken.
Under the service rules of the central government (Rule 11 of Central Civil Services Classification Control and Appeal Rules), which also governs disciplinary action against IISc employees for sexual harassment, disciplinary action includes removal and dismissal from service among the most stringent penalties in cases where sexual harassment is proven.
In its 2017 policy statement on preventing and prohibiting sexual harassment at the workplace, IISc states that it “believes that all its students deserve an education without fear from discrimination and sexual harassment, in order for their education to be more effective and valuable”.
The PhD scholar’s complaint has not been the solitary one in the science community, which for years, because of the tilt in the gender balance, has been plagued by a culture of silence. As The Printreported, Nandita Jayaraj and Aashima Dogra, the co-founders of The Life of Science, created a Google document last week to circulate around the scientific community so that anyone who has been harassed or abused can offer their accounts anonymously.
Over 20 people answered the questionnaire with their accounts over three days. “These stories in our inbox range from an unwelcome sexist comment to actual dangerous situations women find themselves in,” Jayaraj toldThe Print. “Most of the time, the perpetrator is a senior or a guide, holding a position of power over the women who are desperate to not lose their career.”
“Women have seemingly resigned to this and normalised it, feeling grateful that they were just molested and not raped,” she said. “It feels like justice is too much to ask for when they want to be successful.”
At the outset, the study had a lot going for it: Harvard scientists, paper published in a fancy journal, etc. But most coverage ignored two key issues with it.
At the outset, the study had a lot going for it: Harvard scientists, paper published in a fancy journal, etc. But most coverage has ignored two key issues.
Credit: skeeze/pixabay
As we age, our cells start to lose their ability to repair mistakes in their DNA. That’s why older people’s DNA is more prone to damage, making them more prone to diseases like cancer. Recently, scientists at Harvard Medical School showed that it is possible to stop this aspect of ageing. When the elderly subjects of their experiment were fed with water containing a specific molecule, their cells became more resistant to DNA damage – just like when they were younger. This study was published in one of the more reputed scientific journals in the world, Science, on March 24, 2017. So have we finally found our anti-ageing drug?
It’s not that simple.
L. Aravind, an evolutionary biologist at the US National Centre for Biotechnology Information, is one of the authors of the paper. In an email interview, he confirmed that this discovery, at its core, is a biochemical one. It deals with three proteins found in most of our cells: NAD, DBC1 and PARP1. Of these, NAD is a central molecule that is most familiar to us. It is a critical ingredient in hundreds of reactions that keep the cell running. Without NAD, a cell cannot survive.
The PARP1 protein is important because it raises an alarm when the DNA in a cell has been damaged. The cell’s machinery is then triggered to correct this DNA. And DBC1 is a protein that is abundant in cells but the details of its role are a mystery. The researchers now discovered that DBC1 likes to attach itself to PARP1. But this is a problem because a PARP1 stuck to a DBC1 can no longer act as an alarm. That’s bad news for the cell because if its DNA somehow gets damaged, it is then less likely to repair itself.
So is this the end for the cell? No. The team also discovered that NAD can come to the rescue. It turns out that DBC1 also likes to attach to NAD. And DBC1 cannot go stick to a PARP1 anymore if it is already stuck to a NAD. This leaves the PARP1 free to conduct DNA damage correction. In fact, NAD is so dynamic that it even has the power to free a PARP1 from the clutches of a DBC1.
This all implies that the more NAD our cells contain, the more hardy – and capable of correcting DNA damage – our cells are. Older cells have less NAD and so are less hardy than younger cells. This is why these scientists propose that replenishing our cells with NAD “can be used as a means of reducing the side effects of chemotherapy, protecting against radiation exposure, and slowing the natural decline in DNA repair capacity during ageing.”
As an evolutionary biologist, Aravind explored a more fundamental question that this discovery threw up: “Why should such a paradoxical mechanism exist in the first place?”
“PARP1s are major NAD consumers – in a typical run, they can consume several hundred NAD molecules,” he said in an email, pointing out that since NAD is such a central molecule in running the cell, we don’t want PARP1 to run away with all of it unless there is a real danger to the cell. This is why we need DBC1. “It is critical to have a sensor that allows the PARPs to be unleashed only if the concentrations of NAD are high enough to allow this luxury. DBC1 is that sensor. Given that NAD levels decrease with age, this luxury diminishes and thereby [affects] DNA repair.” He summed up this: “Supplementation by NAD precursors might offset some of the issues associated with ageing.”
To get started on testing their hypothesis that NAD could bolster DNA repair, the scientists used mice. It worked. Old mice, even when they were subjected to radiation (which mutates DNA), had their DNA-repair powers boosted to the levels of young mice when fed with an NAD precursor. But something that works in mice need not work in humans. With this in mind, David Sinclair, the lead author of this paper, has announced in a press release that human trials will begin in a hospital in six months and that if all goes well, we could have an NAD-based drug hit the markets in three to five years.
This is hugely optimistic because, as popular as mice are as model organisms for such studies, they come with serious caveats. Radhika Nair, a cancer biologist at the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology, Thiruvananthapuram, told The Wire, “Unfortunately, translating mouse models into actual human trials is a long, expensive process and fraught with failure. This can be attributed to a number reasons such as the differences in mouse and human physiology, the set-up of clinical trials, etc.” She was not involved with the study.
The problem of translating basic research into clinical applications is so severe that a Nature feature in 2008 termed this gap ‘the valley of death’. Aravind, who worked with Sinclair and team on this study, agrees that this bit of research will also have to cross several hurdles before being useful to human beings. “What works well in smaller animals like mice might not scale in large ones like humans. Importantly, the difference in terms of lifespan means the time of initiating treatment in terms of human age needs much more study.”
Point 2: The lead scientist has a commercial interest in this research
David A. Sinclair is a biologist at the Harvard Medical School and a prominent figure in the study of ageing. His lab has come up with significant discoveries in the area before, many of which have also been published in reputed journals and widely publicised. However, all of the papers are careful to disclose this fact “D.A.S. is an unpaid consultant, board member, inventor on patent applications, and holds equity in companies developing NAD precursor–based medicines”.
There is nothing particularly fishy about this. It is quite common for scientists to also be entrepreneurs; some even believe that commercialisation is necessary for promising molecules to be translated quickly into clinically useful products. Nevertheless, it’s important to realise that when a scientist behind a discovery has a company that is looking to cash in on it, it means that he or she has a lot to gain by any hype resulting from the discovery.
It is thus common to see many of these scientist-entrepreneurs go out of their way to make their research accessible to their future customers: the layperson. Sinclair, for example, is a popular face, having given a TEDx Talk, made animations and given plenty of interviews. The unfortunate side-effect of this is that many journalists get lazy when all this information is made readily available for them. There is a temptation to take the information fed to them at face value and that’s how we get sensational reports like the headlines mentioned earlier. Sinclair could not be reached for comments on the media’s coverage of his research.
This is still an important study
None of this is to say that this study is not a significant one. Indeed, it does seem to be, and there are also other scientists involved in the research like L. Aravind who have no commercial interests in it. “I am personally for all research relating to any aspect of human health not being used as an instrument of monetisation,” he clarified. “As an employee of the US government, at least the part my group plays in such research is made entirely publicly available for anyone to use and I don’t gain monetarily from such findings.”
Aravind pointed out that claims of miracle cures have cropped up throughout history, each time disguised as a breakthrough. “Hence, skepticism in this regard is entirely warranted, given that though we understand much more now than 1,000 years ago, we still don’t know a whole lot,” he said. “It is important that the media communicate the logic behind the biochemistry and what these studies are contributing to the understanding of workings of our bodies than trying to sell the hope of the latest elixir.”
Surya Harikrishnan, a professor at Manipal University in Udupi on her research in archaeophotonics, the itch to educate and how growing career.
Surya Harikrishnan, a professor at Manipal University in Udupi on her research in archaeophotonics, the itch to educate and her growing career.
Surya Harikrishnan. Credit: Nandita Jayaraj
Last December, I conducted a science communication workshop at Manipal University as part of the Asia Student Photonics Conference 2016. Like any good hungry lab-hopper, I had one eye out for women scientists throughout the two days I was there. I didn’t have to look very far. Keeping a keen eye on the proceedings and offering the occasional instruction to the students was ‘Surya Ma’am’. While a lecture was in progress, I managed to find Surya Harikrishnan, assistant professor (senior scale) at the Department of Atomic and Molecular Physics and sit down with her for a chat about her life in science.
Thirty-six-year-old Harikrishnan has been a physics professor at Manipal University for over six years but has been teaching since she was 15. She is somewhat reluctant to call herself a researcher. “I officially registered for research only last year, and only from the year before that did I start my preliminary experiments,” she said.
The whats and whys of photonics
Scientists have been studying light for centuries. As the dual nature of light came to be known (it can travel both as a wave or as packets of energy called photons), more and more optics, the study of light, came to become more and more application-oriented. Photonics is a newer term for the field of optics, though there is still an ambiguity surrounding the difference between the two terms. Some consider optics as the study of vision, making it a subset of photonics, the study of light; others regard photonics as applied optics. Because of these varied interpretations, it is not considered wrong to interchange the two words. From what I could gather at the conference, photonics was being considered in the broader sense – as the study of light.
When light hits an object, the two interact in interesting and unique ways. This interaction is typically a pattern of light and dark bands we refer to as a ‘spectrum’. The most popular spectrum is the rainbow, which is the result of white light interacting with water droplets or a prism. The pattern of the spectrum depends on the type, or wavelength, of the light that is used and the composition of the object that it hits. Because of this uniqueness, it is possible to identify the elements that make up an object based on the spectrum created by it when light (of a known wavelength) hits it. Instruments called spectrographs have been developed that can record spectra and compare it to a database to identify the elements.
An explosion of applications
As you can imagine, a technique that can tell you what something is made up of has an ocean of potential. Astronomers (like Seema Pooranchand, who we introduced you to last week) use spectroscopy to identify what far off galaxies, comets, etc. are made of; food-safety regulators use it to detect banned chemicals in food; there are even experiments going on in Harikrishnan’s department lab that look into medical applications of spectroscopy.
“Our lab has developed an oral cancer screening device that can detect cancer at early stages,” she informed me. “What we do is shine a laser into the oral cavity. The light emitted by the tissue is collected by a probe itself, and this is fed into a spectrograph.” Studies have shown that there is a marked difference between spectra of healthy persons, cancer-affected persons, and those prone to oral cancer – so, by comparing spectra, Manipal scientists have managed to show that it is possible to diagnose cancer early.
Hearing about the work in spectroscopy being done at the university, a group of archaeologists who were in nearby Mangalore for a meeting paid them a visit. They began brainstorming on how their expertises could be combined to answer some archaeological questions. Harikrishnan was tasked by the head of the department to write a review article that would explore the scope of archaeophotonics. That’s when Harikrishnan’s interest in the topic began, so when she decided to register for a Ph.D, she knew what her research was going to be.
Throwing light on history
Photonics has so many applications – so why don’t we use it to study ancient pieces like archaeological specimens, she thought. “The first thing people ask is if we are doing dating (estimating the age of samples). No, this is not for dating. My study is based on pre-dated samples,” she said. “Say I get an ancient sample. I can study its elemental and structural composition using laser analysis.”
To do this, Harikrishnan uses a setup called laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), which was assembled by a scientist in their own lab. It consists of a neodymium laser that emits infrared light onto the sample that has to be analysed. When the laser hits the surface of the sample, explained Harikrishnan, tiny amounts of the sample turn into a charged state of matter called plasma. The plasma released is collected with a probe and transferred via optical fibres (fibres that can transmit light) into a spectrograph. The results are then compared with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) database, which has the standard spectrum for all the elements in the periodic table.”We know at what wavelengths zinc or copper, for example, are at, and so we can see whether something is present or not, and if so how much of it is present.”
LIBS setup. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Harikrishnan pictured some scenarios in which this kind of analyses would potentially be useful:
Scenario One: Is this painting authentic?
Somebody is claiming that a painting is from the 16th century. Harikrishnan could do an analysis and find out which pigments are giving colours to the paintings. She can then run these against a database of known pigments listed according to how long they have been in use. If she spots a pigment in the allegedly 16th-century painting that started being synthesised only in the 19th century, then this means the painting may not be authentic.
Scenario Two: How can we save this painting?
Suppose the painting has turned out to be real after all. Now, the museum is going to want to restore it and keep it in good condition. If Harikrishnan can tell them what the material and the paint is made up of, it will help to decide what the best preservation method is.
Scenario Three: What can this coin tell us about the times?
Coins are made up of metals like copper. Metals are typically not found in their pure form but as ores. The process of extracting the metal from the ore, metallurgy, is becoming more efficient with time. If Harikrishnan is given a copper coin from the 16th century, she can analyse its level of purity and compare this with coins found in the same area at different times or different areas at the same time. This can be used to trace and compare technical expertise that existed in the world those days. Moreover, if a copper coin is found in an area whose soil does not have a lot of copper, she could deduce that the area had trade relations with another area richer in copper.
Courtesy of the NIST database
Of course, having just embarked upon her research career, Harikrishnan is some way off before these kinds of projects start coming to her. For now, she uses samples she sources from a colleague in the Department of Architecture who studies the palaeolithic era and from the Udupi Heritage Museum.
Don’t scratch my sample!
It’s not as if there are no other ways to determine what a sample is made of, but most of the traditional methods are not suitable for archaeological studies. “Archaeologists can’t subject their specimens to any kind of destructive techniques. Many of the older techniques involve crushing and powdering, but this means they will lose the sample,” she informed. Laser techniques like the one Harikrishnan uses, on the other hand, are relatively non-destructive. “Whatever form or shape or size your sample is, I do not subject it to any sampling process.”
However, the plasma formation means that LIBS involves tiny amounts of abrasion. “We might lose nanograms of the sample,” she conceded. “It depends on how precious your sample is. In pottery, a small bit is not important if we have one huge chunk. But I read of one case where they wanted to analyse an ancient script which was already in pieces. Moreover, it was important not to lose the pigment that was used to write on it. Here they could not afford to lose even a nanogram of the sample. In these cases, even LIBS is not recommended.”
Nevertheless, LIBS remains hugely attractive for elemental analysis due to its versatility, affirmed Harikrishnan. “It is instantaneous, spans a whole range of wavelengths and the same setup is sufficient for different elements; no specific setup is needed for different elements.”
Still some way to go
Harikrishnan recalled how an archaeologist once gave her three or four pieces of pottery that he had found lying 200 metres apart in a site in Karnataka. The pieces looked similar, so he wanted to understand if the pieces could be from the same pot. But Harikrishnan’s analysis showed that all three pieces had different spectra. The constituent elements were the same – they usually are, she said, in pottery – but the pots were probably fired in a furnace using different techniques or for different durations.
In spite of the results, Harikrishnan reminds me that results of archaeophotonic techniques cannot yet be used as conclusive evidence. “If someone says this is real, I can do an analysis and say that it needn’t be; I cannot say it is not. For example (in the pottery case), it could be that the different spectra was not due to ageing, but because one piece was exposed to more sunlight while the other was buried…”
LIBS still has some hurdles to cross before archaeophotonics can become more mainstream. The assembly, for instance, is still not always portable, making it unrealistic for some kinds of archaeological studies like cave paintings. “For now, my Ph.D objective is to study the applicability of these techniques for archaeology. Maybe in the next ten to 15 years, we will become established and I can say ‘I will do analysis for you.’”
An itch to educate
Harikrishnan was born in Bombay and brought up in Calicut in Kerala. Even though she did her masters in physics, it was always clear to Harikrishnan that teaching was what she wanted to do. “In school, I used to write on the whitewashed walls of her home with chalk thinking that it would never be seen, but later realised that it was visible at an angle! My way of studying itself was by imagining that I was a teacher,” she reminisced.
It wasn’t just an idle dream either. She began taking tuition classes as soon as she passed class ten: “I can proudly say that I’ve been earning since I was 15. In class 11 and 12, I would return from classes by four o’clock, take tuitions for younger students till seven o’clock, and then I would start my own studies. This is how it was till I finished my B.Sc.”
Harikrishnan took a break from teaching during her M.Sc but not for long. While pursuing a B.Ed degree (Bachelors in Education), she taught engineering aspirants part-time at a coaching institute. Wasn’t it too much? No, insisted Harikrishnan. In fact, it was the opposite. “B.Ed was very very stressful, but teaching, it was my relief.”
A turning point and a late decision
After her B.Ed, Harikrishnan taught for five years at Providence Women’s College in Calicut. Her decision to apply for the Indian Institute of Science’s Summer Research Fellowship programme is what she considers her turning point. She qualified and did a project at Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences (CBS), Mumbai, under Dr. Deepak Mathur, who would become a mentor of sorts. Mathur advised her to continue at CBS. “I was about 28 or 29 then, and my job in Calicut was not a permanent one so I thought I should not miss this opportunity.”
Harikrishnan’s job at CBS was to set up the projects and the labs for the fourth-year students studying there. “I really enjoyed it because it gave me the opportunity to work with students who are the cream of the country and meet many senior scientists.” It was again Mathur who pointed her to an opening at Manipal University. She has been teaching here for six years now.
Though her position was a teaching one, Harikrishnan has always thought of research as something that will improve teaching. But the decision to start a Ph.D finally came only years later, when she observed that most institutions these days looked for staff with Ph.Ds. “You are kind of graded and judged according to your research because number of publications is something you can quantify,” she noted. Luckily for her, she found herself in a place conducive enough to research for her to shed her initial disinclination for a long drawn-out research career. “In any other place, with my lack of motivation, I would never do it, but now I am in an environment that is always telling me to do research and there is a great lab,” she said.
Harikrishnan has a lot of things to look forward to in the coming years. Her Ph.D, of course, and also a book on archaeophotonics that she has almost completed. Meanwhile, her first love continues to be teaching. “Some people say ‘oh you are a physics teacher, you must love physics’. My answer is yes, I am a teacher, but because I love teaching,” she said with a smile.
This piece was originally published by The Life of Science. The Wire is happy to support this project by Aashima Dogra and Nandita Jayaraj, who are travelling across India to meet unsung women scientists.
A successful photographer explores his way of helping scientists drive their questions forward instead of just documenting their work
A successful photographer explores his way of helping scientists drive their questions forward instead of just documenting their work
Anand Verma at work. Source: Author provided
When Anand Varma got a chance to photograph for National Geographic’s November 2014 story on mind-manipulating parasites – popularly called zombie parasites – the odds were against him. It was his first feature story and his subject was parasites, hardly a crowd-favourite.
“Most images of parasites were either abstract or revolting, or both abstract and revolting, and I knew I wouldn’t reach people who weren’t already interested in parasites with these kind of photographs. I had to speak to a non-scientific audience – that was the challenge.” So daunting was the idea of making these creatures look likeable that, at one point, Anand was told by the editor that he could do the story without photographs and focus on illustrations instead.
He wasn’t ready to give up. “Maybe not everything needs to be cute and cuddly,” he realised. He looked at some graphic novels and began to experiment with similar themes, light and shadows, to depict some of these parasitic interactions. “It was up to me to prove that photographs have a place in this story,” Anand said. He managed to do it. One of his shots even made it to the cover of the magazine.
In Bengaluru to lead an eight-day workshop hosted by the National Centre for Biological Sciences, along with fellow science photographer Prasenjeet Yadav, Anand’s was the first of two public lectures that will take place this week. His talk, titled ‘Communicating Science Through Photography’, attracted a packed auditorium. “Beauty can be a weapon against apathy and ignorance,” he said about his craft. The next one hour was a treat to lab-worn eyes. Oohs, aahs and awe-struck swearing were aplenty.
After, Nandita Jayaraj caught up with him for The Wire about the thrills and risks of the profession, his process and how much science is part of his art.
You were pursuing an undergraduate degree in biology when you got a part-time gig as a photographer’s assistant. How unconventional was your eventual move from academia to full-time photography?
There were a lot of anxieties. The first decision was just to take this two-week job. Then it was a question of – I really like this, I’m getting to learn a lot, I want to continue working with this photographer but I do not want to be a photographer. That was because academia felt like it was a little bit too constrained. There is a clear path to a career but it means seven years in a lab studying one thing and teaching. I didn’t know if I wanted to teach, I didn’t know what I wanted to dedicate seven years of graduate school to. I felt like there are many aspects of lab work and research that just weren’t as appealing. I really wanted to just explore, learn things about the world and I thought academia was limited in what you could do in pursuit of those activities.
At the same time photography seemed really scary because there was no guarantee, no clear path to a career. It seemed very unstable and insecure. I saw the lifestyle of my employer, the photographer I worked for, he was well established, he worked for National Geographic. He’d been doing it for 25-30 years and he was still stressed about the next job, the next assignment. There was no peace or stability and I thought, hey, I don’t wanna deal with that. I want to have it sorted, not worry about money or jobs every few weeks or months.
So what changed your mind?
It was a slow process of getting more and more opportunities and also becoming more exposed to that stress, long enough that it’s not scary anymore. It’s as uncomfortable as ever but it’s becoming a familiar stress, a familiar anxiety. It became less about money. In the early years, there was a little bit of instability, I hadn’t become established. There was a bit of uncertainty about the money but the bigger stress was how– do I make good enough work? And that generated a lot more anxiety than “how do I get paid for this?”.
Is it a smooth run from hereon?
What helped this transition was that I was getting more and more opportunities – to work for other photographers, working with my own assignments. Now, I have to turn things down. And that’s a very privileged position to be in. I’m getting to pick the stuff that is the best and I’m most interested in. There is still a little anxiety that maybe this is only a phase. I’m popular in NG right now so for the next six months or a year it’s not going to be hard for me to propose a story. But I try very hard to not take that for granted. To remind myself that a year from now I may need to struggle to get people to take my ideas seriously. I may not be as in-demand.
Did or do you plan to go back to the sciences?
I kept getting opportunities that I couldn’t turn down. I thought – OK, I can go to Ecuador now and work on this for the next two months. Am I really going to say no to that to apply to graduate school? I didn’t know where to apply, what I wanted to do, who I wanted to work with. So there is this abstract, unappealing but more defined career track or a more immediate, exciting and appealing career track. I went to the more exciting one – with the idea that if I ever fail, I have the safer option. But it kept getting farther and farther way. “How can I give up on this crazy creative independence and stimulation and venture to go back to academia?”
Queen honeybee (Apis mellifera) surrounded by her attendant worker bees. These bees are part of a US government experimental breeding program to produce parasite-resistant honeybees. Credit: Anand Varma for National Geographic Magazine
Now, what I feel like is, I don’t actually have to give this up to bring back the elements of academia that appealed to me all along, which is “how do I generate new knowledge about the world?”. I thought maybe I can do that as a photographer. I don’t know but this way of partnering with scientists to not just document their work but also help them drive their questions forward and their data forward – collect data with the camera – that’ll satisfy this little itch in me that you’re not really contributing to new knowledge and not answering questions.
So in a way, you’re still doing science…
Yeah.… I can’t really call myself a scientist now. I actually correct people when they label me as that but I can sort of see that my path is pointing more in that direction and there’s a possibility I could publish papers. But no, I’m not really a scientist now but science is still a major part of what I do.
National Geographic was already communicating science through photography when you joined. What do you think you brought to the table?
Yes, they have been documenting science for a long time, communicating scientific discoveries, scientific approaches. I brought a new sort of aesthetic approach to that. Part of that is an illustrative approach where it’s not necessarily documentary journalism – where I’m there looking over somebody’s shoulder as the experiment’s happening, but I’m trying to think about how this experiment is set up and how do I capture the core elements of that, in an accurate way so I’m not misleading anybody – but figuring out how to communicate the set-up and the elements of this experiment in as simple and compelling way as possible. I don’t think quite that approach has been done.
Your work – especially the use of music in your multimedia videos – is very emotionally charged and dramatic. Is that a style you’ve consciously adopted?
Looking back at some of my work – the bee story, the parasite story – I do see a [consistent use] of high energy. It’s something that, now, having seen this pattern, I intentionally think about moving forward. But back then it was more of a default approach, [towards] what captured my attention. You kinda have to crank the level up, get the thing to flash into your eyeballs – this is what captured my attention. That was a split from my mentor whose approach is much more subtle, elegant, beautiful, but not this sort of eyeball-grabbing.
Out of all the shots you take, do you know when you see ‘the one’ – something that gives you complete satisfaction?
Umm… [he’s thinking hard] Depends on when you measure it. I often know when it’s good enough. And for many of those images I couldn’t necessarily tell you how I’d do it better – but I don’t think there was ever a moment when I took a picture, looked at it and thought this is a 100% what I want.
Often when I load the pictures on the computer, I can’t look away. I’m just sitting there and – I just want to look at this picture. Or I close it and I go brush my teeth and then think, “No, I want to go back to this picture.” And sometimes I find myself doing that automatically and then realise I think this means that this worked. But occasionally, I do that for a while and then realise, “No, this is almost there, but no.” Many times it takes two or three days. The ladybug picture that ended up on the cover of NatGeo, I remember leaving pretty disappointed. I actually took a couple of ladybugs back with me. Maybe I’ll keep working on this at home. They published the very last frame that I took. That was as far as I could take it that day.
Is there any sort of manipulation you do with your images?
Post-processing, yeah. But no, no, you can’t move around anything like even a small [piece of] hair on the specimen. You can change contrast, exposure and sometimes some things like removing dust, dirt. I can’t do that for NatGeo but once it’s published, to put on my website, I can get rid of an ugly smudge. Moving around fundamental components or even tiny details like pixels, you can’t do that. I’m very careful about that. You’re dealing with people’s trust. You lose credibility in that sense. Part of the power of this is that it’s real. If this was an illustration generated by some 3D program, it would not have nearly the same power to capture people’s imagination. Here, this is a thing that existed in front of my camera. If you move around stuff, you’ll lose that. At some point, people won’t accept it as real.
Have you any interest in documenting the physical sciences?
Well… I plan on doing that. I don’t know how much I can tell you about a future story but I want to do that. Biology is where my expertise and education has been, so I’m naturally inclined to think about those stories, but I certainly have nothing against geology, chemistry, physics. I haven’t necessarily found the right lab, the right access. You pursue the stories that you can do something with. Then you realise – oh, look, I have really amazing access to these cool things.
Have you found something that fits?
Mmmm. I might have found something though. I’m going to pitch a story about it, my next project.
Some of Anand Varma’s work is available to view on his Instagram.
Beginning with a perfect analogy for cutting open an atom, Vandana Sharma, takes us through the crests and troughs of her research on atom probing machines.
Beginning with a perfect analogy for cutting open an atom, Vandana Sharma takes us through the crests and troughs of her research on atom probing machines.
Vandana with one of the RIM systems she has built. Credit: The Life of Science
“Say you have two fruits: an apple and a mango. To see which one has the bigger seed, you have to first cut it, right? Here the fruit is an atom.”
“The knife to cut an atom is made of charged particles or a source of light. With this, we can cut the atom and observe the fragments coming out and see how they evolve over a period. We can trace back the history of the atom. And now with the advent of laser technology, we can image this in real time!”
With this analogy, Vandana Sharma introduced me to her field of research. The 37-year-old heads the ‘Few Body Quantum Dynamics Laboratory’ at IIT Hyderabad, one of the eight new IITs founded in 2008.
Being less than ten years old with a brand new campus, the institute was not initially on my lab-hopping list. However, the university website changed my mind. It appeared that the R&D wheels were rolling already. Besides, I noticed a happy predominance of young faculty members, many of whom have returned home after being trained at prestigious institutions abroad. Sharma is one of them.
How to cut open an atom
When she first adopted the research problem of imaging atoms during her Ph.D, it was already known that if a charged particle or a photon (a tiny particle of light or electromagnetic radiation) was made to bombard an atom or a molecule sample, this collision would result in the usually-neutral atom losing an electron and becoming positively charged or ‘ionised’. Instruments equipped with specialised detectors can sense, amplify and record the electrons that are generated from this collision. These signals tell scientists more about the construction of this atom or the molecule sample it came from.
Though the technology was there, the instruments, called Recoil Ion Momentum Spectrometers (RIMS), were unavailable in India. Even for prestigious academic research institutions like the ISRO-funded Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad, where Sharma did her Ph.D, or even IIT, they were too expensive. That’s why back in the early 2000s Bhas Bapat, her Ph.D guide, thought it would be a good idea for them to build their own. This had never been done before in India.
It was a tall task. Bapat was one of the newer faculty members at PRL at the time and Vandana was his only student. “There was nothing in our lab, whereas the other students who joined (for Ph.D) in the same batch had everything in theirs,” recalled Vandana. It was a frustrating period for her.
The parts they required – such as the detector and the laser – needed to be ordered and each order took six months to arrive. Some other parts had to be designed from scratch in the lab and the design sent to companies who would fabricate it accordingly. Further time was spent on tweaks and defects to be corrected. “All this took about three-four years, and it was a struggle to watch my batchmates already doing experiments and starting to write papers. I thought I will not be able to finish my Ph.D.”
But fortunately for Sharma, the toughest part was over. “After that, it took only two-three months for me to do the experiments and acquire all the data. My batchmates had already submitted their papers but I was the first to get my paper accepted – the last to submit, but the first to get published,” she smiled widely. Sharma went on to publish seven papers during her PhD.
Vandana and the machine
Today, almost ten years after its creation, the detector has come a long way. It has been used successfully to probe into simple molecules like oxygen, carbon dioxide and carbon tetrachloride. Soon, it will be ready for experiments with more complex molecules, even DNA. The key is the inbuilt detector that amplifies any signal detected.
If an oxygen molecule is the sample, it is first ionised and then when the O2 ion hits the surface of the detector, two secondary electrons are released. This goes on to release four more electrons, followed by eight and then 16, so much that eventually an ‘electron cloud’ is formed which can be recorded by the machine Sharma helped built with her guide.
The electron cloud itself tells us very little but the data about where the ion hit and what time it hit gives Sharma specifics on the structure of the sample molecule. “We can tell how the electrons are arranged in the atom – if the electron came from a low energy level (close to the nucleus of the atom) or a high energy level (close to the outer surface of the atom).”
But don’t we already know about the electronic configuration of atoms? I asked, recalling high school physics. Sharma replied, “For many things we do – for atoms it’s very well studied, but for molecules it’s not. We are only starting out with O2 – we know a lot about it so we can compare our results and see if our system works fine. Now that we know it does, we can go ahead to bigger molecules like DNA, bacteria…”
The system she has developed cannot be patented as the technology is not new, however the resolution obtained is leaps ahead, so Sharma believes that hers has an edge.
Determined to be a ‘Dr.’
Growing up in Khetri Nagar, Rajasthan, Sharma dreamt of becoming a medical doctor. But remembering biological facts was never her strength, she said. Vandana could not secure an MBBS seat. She took up B.Sc in Physics at Rajasthan University. By then, however, she’d gotten attached to the idea of having ‘Dr.’ prefixed to her name, and when she realised that there was still a way, she was set for an M.Sc and a Ph.D.
Unfortunately, her father had decided that she would go for a Master’s in Computer Application(MCA). “Being from a village he used to think computer science was the only growing science.” When she resisted, her father warned that he would not fill up any of her (M.Sc.) forms and that he would fix her marriage. “That was a very strong slap on my face. I did not want to get married.” But both father and daughter were stubborn and for a whole week, Sharma was given the silent treatment.
Meanwhile, Sharma heard the results for the IIT entrance exam were out. She listened disbelievingly as the recorded message on her phone informed her that she was ranked 17! Vandana told her sister about this but it seemed too incredible to announce it to her father just yet. She wasn’t sure what his reaction would be. Before she had the chance to tell him, the postman rang the bell. “It’s a small town you know. He told my father some counselling letter has come, sweet chahiye (I want celebratory sweets).” Her father was puzzled at first but when she told him it must be her IIT results, he opened the letter to check. “Then he said ‘Vandana, prepare your bags, you have to go to IIT.’”
During her M.Sc at IIT Roorkee Sharma got the exposure in physics she needed badly. “Back in the village, I only had a few good teachers. I did not even know what a Ph.D was, though I knew that with a Ph.D you will get the ‘Dr.’ title. In Roorkee, I really could understand what physics is. I cleared all the exams and got into PRL for my Ph.D.”
Sharma let me in on a happy accident in her life that she says she’s never talked about before. “In the first few months of Ph.D coursework, I went to my (future) Ph.D boss for the first time. It was actually not to join his research group but just to talk to him about how long a Ph.D will take and whether I will be able to get a postdoc after that. I was not very fluent in English. So maybe because of this, he understood from what I said that I am joining him and he congratulated me and welcomed me to his group. I was shocked – what did I say! And so, because of a play of words – either I said it wrong, or he got it wrong – this happened.”
After her Ph.D, Sharma did postdocs in the US and in Germany. The former was especially meaningful to her. “The reason my father was fixated on an MCA degree was because he wanted me to go to the US, come back and open a school. At the gate of the school, he said, there should be a sign: Hindi is not allowed here.” She explained that this desire of his came from his struggles with English. “His goal was to open an affordable English school in our hometown. I told him I don’t know if I can fulfil your dream but I will try to go to US for sure. When I did, he was very happy.”
Kinds of discrimination
Sharma is married and has a child with her fellow-physicist husband. They were both working in Europe, she in academics and he in the industry, when they decided to come back to India after battling the infamous ‘two-body problem’ in academia (where a couple in academia find it difficult to obtain jobs in the same university. It’s likely that in such cases, the female gives up her professional life for the sake of the family staying together). Sharma beats the odds. Today, her husband works at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Hyderabad. “I would say that he compromised a little bit but still we are both happy because we are in the same city. I feel both should be in the same place because productivity increases.”
Sharma went through another trial while applying for jobs when she was pregnant in Germany. “If they see you are pregnant – even if they say no discrimination on paper, it’s not true. This happens everywhere, not just in India. I was shortlisted for many positions but in the final step I lost out because I was pregnant,” she said.
After she delivered her baby, she noticed things got a bit easier, but while sitting for interviews for faculty positions in India, she realised there was a new type of discrimination facing her. “The kind of questions they ask… They asked me ‘your husband is in the Netherlands and you are applying here, how will you manage?’ I felt like giving it back to them! Why don’t they realise that if I have applied for the position, I must have thought about this? Why should they worry? The interviewers must not worry about my family matters – I will take care of that. They don’t ask this from any male applicants. This is really a drawback for women.”
Now, seated on the other end of the table, Sharma is careful to be straightforward about her hiring policy. “If I find a female candidate better than a male candidate, I will prefer the better candidate. If the candidate drops out, it is a loss for the system (that has trained them). To disqualify the female based on an assumption that she will drop-out along the way is unfair. A male also can make that decision, right? A candidate may have many offers, and a female has as much right as a male to choose the best one for her.”
Working at a new IIT where buildings are still coming up and a lot of infrastructure is still under construction is a challenge, admitted Sharma, but it gives her a lot of freedom that she cherishes. “You become a pillar of this institute, you feel proud. You may not get as much time as you want for research, but you are making path for the newcomers.” Now that the instruments she’s developed are complete, fully tested, and the experiments have begun, Vandana’s lab is on the brink of an interesting future.
This piece was originally published by The Life of Science. The Wire is happy to support this project by Aashima Dogra and Nandita Jayaraj, who are travelling across India to meet unsung women scientists.
A.J. Rachel, a molecular biologist, was determined to prove that the Y heterochromatin was not junk.
A.J. Rachel, a molecular biologist, was determined to prove that the Y heterochromatin was not junk.
A.J. Rachel. Courtesy: The Life of Science
Though human DNA, or the genome as it is called, is a chain of around three billion molecules called base pairs, only small segments of them called genes are involved in making/coding proteins. There are 20,000 such genes and together they constitute less than 2% of the whole genome. In the early days of genomics, only genes were considered useful. The rest of the genome was termed junk DNA. This irked scientists for years. How could 98% of the genome be just sitting there doing nothing?
Our genome is organised in each cell of our body as 23 pairs of chromosomes. One pair of these 23 are the ‘sex chromosomes’ and these typically are either XX (in the biologically female) or XY (in the biologically males). As chromosome-Y is the one granting a mammalian individual with biological maleness, most of its genes tend to be have roles specific to males, such as biological sex determination and sperm development. But here’s where the mystery starts: chromosome-Y has very few genes – just about 50-60 out of total 20,000 human genes existing in all other chromosomes.
In fact, one of the largest chunks of junk DNA in the human genome lies on the Y chromosome (chrY) and is called the Y heterochromatin. This is a block of DNA 40 million base pairs long (out of a toatl length of 59 million base pairs). For a long time, this region seemed to have no discernable function. It is composed mostly of sequence repeats and has no genes (DNA segments that can code for proteins). Because of this poverty of genes, chrY is known as one of the genome’s largest ‘gene deserts’.
Rachel asks Y
A.J. Rachel, a molecular biologist in CCMB, was determined to prove that the Y heterochromatin was not junk. “It’s just basic intuition. Nature is not wasteful. If something is present, it has a function,” she said to me matter-of-factly as we settled down in her office. It is with this unshakeable belief, and years of training as a biologist, that Rachel set her sights on solving this important piece of the junk DNA puzzle when she joined the centre 30 years ago.
For a long time, this large chunk on chrY was thought to be functionally inert. It was thought not to participate in processes like transcription where genes are copied into molecules called messenger RNAs (mRNA) and translation where this mRNA codes for proteins. But Rachel and her colleagues had a breakthrough. They used a DNA probe and identified two transcripts (mRNA) that were produced from this region. For the first time, it was proved that this region is not inert after all.
But this is was not enough for Rachel to definitively junk the junk hypothesis. “We needed to find out the function of these transcripts.” Further testing showed that these transcripts would go on to physically mix with another transcript produced from a gene situated in chromosome-1.
This mixing called ‘splicing’ is an important modification that happens before protein synthesis. Splicing refers to the editing of the mRNA to produce a more mature mRNA that is ready to code for proteins. Usually it involves the splitting of the mRNA, the disposal of the unwanted portions, and the rejoining of the wanted portions.
A schematic explaining splicing – to put it simplistically, the mRNA’s useful parts (exons) join together and the useless ones (introns) are subtracted. In the case of Rachel’s discovery, the 5`UTR region of the chr1 mRNA was shown to come from the chrY mRNA. Courtesy: The Life of Science
When a part of mRNA from one chromosome splices into the mRNA from another, as was happening between chrY and chromosome-1, it is called ‘trans-splicing’. This is exceedingly rare. Rachel’s team not only discovered this but also found out that this trans-splicing by chrY was important to regulate how much protein the chr1 mRNA should synthesize and when the protein synthesis should occur.
What does this all mean?
The most exciting part of this discovery was that this trans-splicing event happens only in the cells of the testes. Fom Rachel’s experiments it was clear that chrY is regulating a gene that is transcribed specifically in the testes. What does this tell us, she wondered. Firstly, it shows that this DNA in the chrY that was once considered junk is regulating protein synthesis in testes even though this region does not code for any protein itself. “No trans-splicing between coding mRNA and noncoding mRNA was known till then – and none with chrY. So this means chrY may not just be sitting there determining sex and doing nothing else.”
Secondly this region in chrY is species-specific, Rachel pointed out. The sequence they were studying was present only in humans, not, say, in mice. “You see, male fertility is being regulated by species-specific repeats (this region) present in the chrY. So if by chance some repeats from another species come, they cannot regulate genes involved in human male fertility.” This fits in with our knowledge that cross-species fertilisation does not work. “Man cannot cross with mouse, clearly.”
Fundamental discoveries like these are adding new dimensions to what we know about the human genome. Even though lesser than 2% of the genome code for proteins, today, over 75% of the genome is known to be transcribed into mRNA. These RNAs may not make it to the protein stage but they all have some function or the other. “100% of the genome will have a function,” affirms Rachel, “we just have to discover it.”
This study done in Rachel’s lab was published in Genome Research journal in 2007, and was considered a landmark of sorts. In fact, it even came up for discussion in both houses of the parliament that year, revealed Rachel. “It was the time we thought India lost out in the Human Genome Project. This study came up to show that Indian scientists are still discovering novel transcripts and functions, so how can you say that India did not contribute? That was the discussion.”
To bolster their findings, Rachel and her colleagues experimented with mouse chrY and here too they found non-coding RNAs involved in regulation of autosomal (other than sex chromosomes) genes in mouse testes. “This proved that it is not an isolated event we found in the human genome but seems to be a pervasive phenomenon.”
The ‘basic intuition’ that basic biologists so rely on to design their studies may or may not be something they are born with, but what is certain is that years of training go into honing that skill. For Rachel, signs pointing her to a life of science started popping up early – in the form of back-to-back scholarships.
Early life and scholarships
“I grew up in Kottarakara, a town in Kerala. I did my basic education in a Malayalam medium school there,” she said. “I used to love reading scientists’ biographies. Marie Curie was a favourite.” Curie’s achievements despite coming from a modest background resonates with Rachel. “I believe it’s not school that matters but intelligence. Good students will come up anywhere.”
Though her parents were school teachers, she recalls her father being very academically oriented. “He made me write these exams. Through one such exam in my class six, I got something called the residential school scholarship (this was given to 200 students all over india).” With this, Rachel got admission to the Rishi Valley school, still considered one of the best residential schools in India.
After finishing her schooling in Rishi Valley, Rachel continued her impressive run by securing herself the science talent scholarship (now evolved into NTSE). This scholarship would facilitate her education in the basic sciences up to doctoral level. “My journey in science began with this. After doing my BSc and MSc in zoology at Women’s College in Trivandrum, I left for Banaras Hindu University to do my PhD.” At this stage, Rachel had also won the CSIR fellowship to aid her research.
Rachel joined CCMB in 1976 and 30 years on, “I’m still enjoying the basic sciences!” Almost 60, Rachel is due to retire in five months (“Do you still want to interview me?” she’d asked, earlier).
Grateful to India, yet worried
Though she completed a couple of postdocs in US universities, Rachel was not significantly tempted by the idea of settling down there. And there were many opportunities too. “I was even invited by a professor during a conference at BHU to come do any work I liked in his lab. But I thought why can’t we do good work in india, why should we go out always? I also had that feeling of – India nurtured me, gave me scholarships – so why can’t I do good work here.”
She was somewhat vindicated later on, following the 2007 Y-chromosome discovery. “When I published the paper, some visiting scientists asked me: ‘who is your foreign collaborator?’ I informed them there is no foreign collaborator. They replied ‘no foreign collaborator? All this work done in India?!’” she said, laughing at the perceived irony.
Which is not to say that doing science is a smooth ride here. “There are definitely ‘n’ number of hurdles in India,” admitted Rachel. “The scientific atmosphere in India needs to change. They are trying to introduce too much of bureaucracy. They don’t leave scientists alone.” Interestingly, she is not talking about the government but scientists themselves, the ones at higher levels. “Scientists themselves do politics. And honestly, in the last 30 years I have only seen it getting worse.”
“You need a free mind. Leave the scientists alone. The government gives us projects so that we can work regardless of red tapism, but the execution is really not good. The minute people come into power, they try to prevent others from doing science. I resent that.” Rachel suspects that this culture could be what is preventing India perhaps from rising as a world power in science.
Rachel never felt discriminated as a woman in her career, though she says that it could be because she had more time and energy as she did not get married and start a family. She joked, “I used to like standing up and telling the men what the Y chromosome does! Ha ha. I’m a lady and I’m doing this. Just fun times…”
Not much of a retirement
Now that she is approaching her retirement, Rachel has some plans, but none of them involve sitting back and taking it easy. “I don’t care for power, position, I just want to be left alone to do science. [This attitude] has helped me so far but I still have work to do – I have two DBT projects which will go on till 2019. Once the director gives me permission, I will continue till then – here or anywhere else.”
Rachel proudly shows of her newest ‘toy’ the minION, a pocket-sized device for DNA analysis. Courtesy: The Life of Science
And after that, Rachel wants to continue contributing, but in a different way: “As long as I can, I want to be energetic and active. The rest of the time, I want to devote to the havenots – children especially.” She already volunteers with organisations like Don Bosco to interact with street children, and she’d like to give more time to this. “After retirement I will go and work with one of the mission fields of the churches. Somewhere where the need is. Hyderabad has been home, but I don’t know what the future holds. It doesn’t – shouldn’t – matter where I am as long as I can help those who need it.”
This piece was originally published by The Life of Science. The Wire is happy to support this project by Aashima Dogra and Nandita Jayaraj, who are travelling across India to meet unsung women scientists.
“I used to hate standing up and doing experiments, absolutely abhor it. I thought that there should be some other way I can contribute.”
“I used to hate standing up and doing experiments, absolutely abhor it. I thought that there should be some other way I can contribute.”
Lipi Thukral. Credit: The Life of Science.
There is a common perception that biologists can’t code and that’s alright because they don’t need to, anyway. Computational structural biologist Lipi Thukral’s academic journey was founded on the busting of that myth. “From the beginning, we are told that descriptions define biology. But that’s not how it is anymore. To convert our descriptive training to analytical training is a challenge but definitely a required skill for those of us doing science in 2016.”
Thukral makes an instant impression. She greeted me at the lobby of the swanky IGIB South Delhi campus with a firm handshake and a smile, warm and confident. I had to quicken my pace to keep up with her as she led me around her lab before we settled into an empty conference room to talk about her life and the events leading up to her becoming one of the youngest faculty members at the institute.
Picking up the hints
“I was somehow always motivated by science… it sounds cliched now!” said Thukral, who was born in Rudrapur, a town in Uttarakhand. Her family moved a lot. She was schooled in Nainital, Kanpur and Lucknow before they finally settled down in Delhi when Thukral was in her final year of schooling. Driven by her interest in the subject, Thukral enrolled to do her bachelor’s in biotechnology in Amity University. This was in 2001, when not many colleges offered a biotechnology course, but Thukral was sure she did not want to study classical biology.
But two months into her course, she began to get fidgety. “I realised this is not for me.” She laughed sheepishly, “I used to hate standing up and doing experiments, absolutely abhor it.” It may sound like a minor pet peeve, but in Thukral’s case, this was something of a turning point. “I thought that there should be some other way I can contribute [to science].”
“My father had inculcated in me the reasoning that if you are interested in something – like ‘a’, out of ‘a-z’ – then pick up the hints. Do everything you can to pursue ‘a’.” Thukral did exactly that. One of her course subjects, bioinformatics, had intrigued her. She found it amazing that certain biological experiments too complicated to conduct in the laboratory could be carried out easily using computers. She decided she would do her best to understand these tools. When her father pointed out that there were programming classes close by, she jumped at the opportunity to learn.
After each day in college, from 6 pm to 8 pm, Thukral immersed herself in the world of C and C++ programming. She admits that her evening education inspired her way more than the daytime one. “I was still very interested in biology, but now from a different perspective – not from standing,” she laughed.
Lipi showing around the labs. Credit: The Life of Science
Bioinformatics. It doesn’t matter where.
Thanks to her coding training on the side, Thukral was crystal clear about what she wanted to practise – computational biology. Not everyone agreed. “In 2004, everyone questioned my choice to go studying bioinformatics. They told me it is not a subject worth studying. ‘Study microbiology, biochemistry, immunology… biotechnology! Why don’t you do biotechnology?’ they said. None of my classmates understood my decision,” recalled Thukral. She was unperturbed by the exaggerated opinions because she understood bioinformatics was a great tool for overcoming experimental techniques. She knew that with it, she could employ computational techniques to better understand biology.
Thukral’s philosophy has always been to focus on the subject of her passion, rather than the place of study. She pursued her master’s in bioinformatics in Banasthali University, a women-only institution in Tonk, Rajasthan, known for its computer department, instead of opting for a more conventional course at one of the so-called elite institutions in the country.
At Banasthali, Thukral was faced with an interesting scenario. It’s difficult for students to get permission to leave the campus, but the campus is huge and within it, there was complete freedom. “We’d have classes at 7, 8, 9 pm and they promoted computers in hostel rooms. I found this environment very conducive for studying,” said Thukral.
Bioinformatics had just begun its big boom, and faculty at Banasthali were struggling to keep up with the hype. Thukral did her bit. “I was bad at theory classes but I would do all the practicals.” During this time, she started a website called ‘Lipi’s Bioinformatics World’. She admitted this to me rather embarrassedly (“it’s not updated and full of crappy stuff right now”), but when I pointed out to her that this sort of initiative is quite admirable for a student of science, she agreed.
Project and a paper
In her final year, Thukral was offered a place to do a project in France but she chose to do a project under IIT Delhi’s B. Jayaram instead as his topic of research interested her more. Jayaram was using supercomputing to solve the ‘protein folding problem’.
The protein folding problem
Protein Folding Schematic. Credit: The Life of Science
Proteins are made up of compounds called amino acids which are chained together in a specific sequence. The sequences, however, are not linear; they exist twisted and turned in specific contortions that determine the protein’s function. Hence, the shape of a protein is valuable information to have. We know how to take a protein sample and determine its sequence, but to be able to deduce what 3D shape this sequence will take has been a challenge.
Bioinformaticians like Jayaram develop software (his is called ‘Bhageerath’) that can predict what shape a protein will take, with just the sequence information as input. In his lab, Thukral was assigned to write an algorithm to predict the types of ‘loops’ a protein’s structure could contain. She succeeded, and the resulting tool called ‘ProRegIn’ was released and published in the following year. Thukral, thus, managed to have a paper published as the first author at the end of her six-month master’s project. This marked her official entry into the world of research.
“Now, on the other side, I’m stunned by how casually students approach projects,” commented Thukral. “I understand that competitive research labs have limited seats, but one has to be more tactful – writing comprehensive emails, meeting the supervisor, actually knowing the research problem the PI (principal investigator) is working on, is mandatory.” She emphasised the importance of a ‘prepared’ email. “It’s just a way of distinguishing yourself from the rest of the application. If I spot one such application among ten, it will make my day.”
[Thukral’s sentiment reminded me of something TIFR neuroscientist Vidita Vaidya (who was also the one who nominated Thukral for The Life of Science) had tweeted a few months back.]
When internship requests start with “Dear Sir/Madam” I bin them – no one wants an intern who cannot do even a rudimentary search.
Dancing is one of Lipi’s hobbies that she pursued in Germany. Credit: The Life of Science
After a successful project, there was no doubt in Thukral’s mind that she was going to pursue a PhD next. She chose the US as her preferred destination and began to get her applications ready. But applying to foreign universities is an expensive affair, much more so ten years ago than it is today. “It was financially a bit difficult time for my family and my ten applications cost about Rs 50,000. And all this for no sure-shot output! Yet, they were very supportive,” she said. Then, something unexpected happened. “Someone – some Indian researcher I did not know – found my website (Lipi’s Bioinformatics World) interesting and randomly emailed me. He asked me what I was doing now.” The stranger-wellwisher also turned Thukral’s attention to cutting-edge research being done in two German universities and suggested that she apply there too.
Thukral was completely awe-struck at the research being done at one of the labs led by computational biophysicist Jeremy Smith at Heidelberg University. She applied for a position and made it. Fortunately, her five years of PhD in Germany ended up being some of the best of her life. “It was a very international lab. Jeremy hired men and women equally, was very open and a progressive leader.” Thukral also became a fluent German speaker.
Thukral and her Heidelberg lab members. Credit: The Life of Science
Choosing to come back
All these years, Thukral missed one person sorely. “My boyfriend, who I met in IIT, was in India. I was devastated [to leave him] but I told him I can’t do anything, I have to go and do my PhD,” she shrugged. “He is as supportive as my parents but so many years of long-distance relationship is very difficult.” She came back to see him once or twice a year. “I could have saved all that money instead but relationships require effort. If not, they will fall apart.”
Thukral finished her PhD when she was just 26 years old. She returned to India and got married. She decided that she would stay and become part of Indian academia. Was that not a difficult shift? Yes, affirmed Thukral. The conventional path for an Indian to be part of the academia seems to involve a PhD abroad, followed by a postdoc and then return. “I decided I would just prove this wrong. I would do a good postdoc in India and get to a faculty position. Once you publish. Who will say no to you?”
She received a huge shot in the arm by winning the Department of Science and Technology’s INSPIRE Faculty fellowship in 2012. This meant that Thukral now had a generous research allowance of Rs 7 lakh per annum for a period of five years. The scheme was launched specifically to attract young scientific talent less than 32 years of age. With a fellowship in hand and two more published papers, Thukral joined IGIB as faculty. Today she is a senior scientist.
At the time she started her career in India, Thukral noticed that some senior, orthodox male scientists reacted peculiarly to her. A fellowship of Rs 80,000 a month is considered sizeable in Indian science and most scientists don’t get that much. As a result, there was some resentment. “The problem is that I am compared sometimes to the wife of a fellow male colleague,” she said, protesting against her income being seen as the secondary salary in a family, as the husband is still considered the primary earner. Many consider Thukral’s fellowship to be too much. “This is the kind of computation everyone does and I find it hilarious. I’m not to be compared with your wife! I’m the one with the PhD!”
Research at her lab today
In her lab, Thukral and her students develop computational tools to study the interaction of proteins with membranes (the cover enclosing cells or parts of cells from the outside environment). Protein-membrane dynamics are a crucial part of many bodily functions and form the basis of many diseases like cancer. To illustrate the significance of this, Thukral used the example of autophagy, the cellular phenomenon for which Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan has won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Autophagy is the process in which debris and unwanted material in a cell get enclosed in a bubble called a vesicle and are transported to the lysozyme (a cell organelle) for degradation. This degradation produces energy. Because of this, when a cell is starving, autophagy is triggered as a way for it to make energy.
Computational modelling enables Thukral to understand this process at a fundamental level. What takes place on the vesicle membrane that tells it how and when to act? This molecular perspective is unimaginably difficult to attain experimentally.
Specifically, Thukral looks at proteins which can be used as ‘markers’ or indicators of autophagy. The knowledge of such marker proteins can make it easy for scientists to detect if autophagy is happening in a cell or not. One such protein is LC3. Thukral used her software tools to predict that LC3 plays a crucial role in vesicle formation. For autophagy to initiate, LC3 needs to be present. Only when LC3 interacts with c-shaped isolation membranes will they elongate and form the enclosed bubble or vesicle. She even predicted the exact amino acids of LC3 protein that were responsible for this function.
The small green balls represent LC3. This image shows how the isolation membrane elongates to form the vesicle. Credit: Vassilios Will Kotiadis’s ResearchGate, via The Life of Science.
All of the research required for getting these results was done virtually. Thukral collaborated with experimentalists in the lab, who found out that without LC3, the whole process broke down. This proved her finding. “If we narrow down the region responsible for a function, we can go on to develop inhibitors of autophagy.” This process of recycling energy in the cell can be switched on and off.
Why is controlling autophagy useful? “LC3 protein has been reported to play a role in cancer. What is unknown is: does it increase cancer or inhibit it?” said Thukral. A paradox arises because some experiments have shown that autophagy is elevated in cancer cells, whereas other studies have shown that autophagy obstructs tumour formation. “If we study this further, we can have answers.”
To aid her research, Thukral is grateful for the services of CSIR’s supercomputer situated in Bengaluru’s 4th Paradigm Institute. “Computationally, you have to understand – these are multi-million atom systems. The molecular assemblies are really large in number and to tackle them one needs resources. The supercomputer allows this.”
Thukral feels that India has some great things going for it with regard to computational biology research. “In Germany, they struggle to get people with good coding knowledge. But we are an IT hub. We have all these people who are trained in software development. I urge them to explore how they can utilise this knowledge to address biological problems.” So what’s missing?
“We have an excellent pool but we are scared to ask the bigger questions. For example, can I, at an atomistic level, simulate an entire cell?”
Can we? Absolutely, affirmed Thukral. “I can see this happening in my lifetime.”
This piece was originally published by The Life of Science. The Wire is happy to support this project by Aashima Dogra and Nandita Jayaraj, who are travelling across India to meet unsung women scientists.
Wildlife biologist, Orus Ilyas studied ungulates in Himalayan forests of Binsar, while also conducting a socioeconomic study for the WWF in the region.
Wildlife biologist, Orus Ilyas studied ungulates in Himalayan forests of Binsar, while also conducting a socioeconomic study for the WWF in the region.
Orus Ilyas of Aligarh Muslim University. Credit: The Life of Science
The city of Aligarh looks peaceful and full of an old-world charm that is missing 150 km away in New Delhi. I sat perched nervously on the seat of a rickety cycle rickshaw as the driver took me from the railway station to the hundred-year-old Aligarh Muslim University. AMU’s campus is vast and dotted with historical landmarks, yet impeccably-maintained and modern. Students milled about, on campus and on foot. Most were male, probably because most undergraduate courses for females take place in the nearby Women’s College, separate from the main AMU campus.
The college, in recent times, has been mired in sexism and homophobia-related controversies. I was curious to talk to some women scientists and get a sense of the scientific research culture here. Orus Ilyas, 44, has been associated with AMU since her MSc days. Today she is Assistant Professor in AMU’s Wildlife Sciences department.
Goral. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Her journey began in 1996 in the remote forests of Binsar situated in the Kumaon Himalayas in Uttarakhand. The Binsar Valley Wildlife Sanctuary was established in 1988 after a long movement led by some of the locals who recognised that the broad leaf oak forests around them needed protection.
Studying ungulates and a deal with WWF
For her PhD, Ilyas wanted to study the biodiversity of herbivorous ungulates (hoofed mammals like goats and deer) – especially barking deer and goral – endemic to unexplored areas like Binsar. These two animals have not been extensively studied even today. “Yet, they are important ecologically. She illustrated this for me with an example: “Have you heard of the dodo? There was a plant in Mauritius which existed along with it. Dodos used to feed on its seeds and defecate it out. This seed would then germinate. After the dodo went extinct, the populations of these plants also drastically reduced.”
Barking deer. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
What Ilyas was trying to tell me with this analogy was that ungulates are important to its ecosystem in several such indirect ways. “To sustain tigers in habitat, we have to have prey base. Ungulates are preferred food for large cats. Moreover, they balance ecosystem by acting as natural gardeners – they graze the grasses and disperse seeds. They are the link between grasses and top carnivores.”
The area of Binsar was in those days highly remote. It was expensive to travel to and there was no place to stay. But all Ilyas could see was the thrill of unexplored biodiversity. “I accepted this as a challenge.” In the process of securing permissions from authorities and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to conduct her own research in the protected area, she agreed to take up another WWF-funded project on the side.
“The moment you declare an area protected, the locals are not supposed to take anything from the forest anymore,” explained Ilyas. “Until then, they were taking fuel wood for timber and everything from the forest, free of cost – so when they were stopped there was some agitation. They wanted the area to be protected, too, but they did not know their way of living will be stopped.” Sensing the conflict between the forest department and the locals, WWF knew that the way to resolve the situation is through an assessment of how dependent locals are on the forest, so that they could be provided with alternatives to reduce this dependency. Ilyas was to conduct this assessment.
The people of Binsar
“The government had no plan for them – and even the few plans they made failed because they were implemented without assessing the dependency of the people.” Ilyas described how the government once trained locals to culture honeybees, but when they finally provided them with bees to start off with, it was a species that could not survive in these climates. As a result, most people in Binsar’s villages were unemployed. The 10-20% of employed people were in the army, but the rest of the households depended on the forest for energy (fuelwood), fodder (food for cattle) and agriculture.
But to conduct the socioeconomic WWF study, Ilyas needed the specifics. She had to get the residents to open up about their consumption patterns. Being female helped. “I had the liberty to go inside kitchens. When you are there, mixing with the local women, and being one of them, they eventually open up. It was easier for me to to talk to them compared to the male researchers who had attempted this before me.”
This mattered, because according to Ilyas, it is the women who run households in these areas. “It is the women who work throughout the day – they do all household work, go into the forest to collect fuel wood, and they take cattle for grazing, cut grasses, logging trees.”. Ilyas had recognised this imbalance early, while doing her MSc project in Ranikhet, another hill station in the Himalayan Almora district. “I knew that women are the target group through whom we can actually extract the information.”
Ilyas with the people of Binsar. Credit: Orus Ilyas
So where are the men, I asked. “Most men in these parts of the Himalayas are difficult. They don’t want to speak – unemployed and after sunset totally drunk. They are only involved in ploughing the field – other times they are idle or gambling – it’s not good.”
Doing more to help
During her initial days in Binsar, a well-known activist in the area Mukti Dutta helped Ilyas. Dutta was one of the leaders of the movement that got the area the ‘protected’ status. Mukti had invited Ilyato stay in her estate and shared with her the maps of the area she had made.
Two years into her assessment, Ilyas decided to try her hand at some implementation programmes to help the women. “I wanted to see for myself – are they ready to accept the change. Kyunki mera ye maanna hain ki jab aurat ke haath mein paisa ho to [if a woman has money in her hand], she feels empowered.”
Having lived with them for so long, the strength of these women had left a deep impression on Ilyas. “You must visit Kumaon. There you will see, in risky rough terrains, women cutting wood. Imagine! A 60 kg log of wood and a child on their back, they carry both. That fascinated me. Every day they do this – it’s so hard.”
Armed with some funds with WWF and two field assistants, Ilyas chose two villages to focus on. They invested in charkhas (spinning wheels). For the first village, Dalar, which had 12 houses, they bought five charkhas and hired one more person to train the village’s women in weaving. Six months later, they moved the charkhas to the second village Risal. “We heard that out of 12 houses [in the first village] six bought their own charkha. That was a big achievement for me.”
Studying ungulates
Throughout this time, Ilyas was also working on her PhD project. Most of the WWF work in the villages was done in the evening while the mornings she would spend trailing barking deer and goral in the forests. “I would walk on line transects (a way to estimate the density of wildlife populations over large areas) in the mornings. I was on field before sunrise, when the animals are most active.”
Ilyas on the field. Credit: Orus Ilyas
Ilyas surveyed 19 sites from 1995 to 1997. She believes that as we study these creatures more, they may come to reveal secrets that we do not yet know. “This is why we talk about conservation. We still may not know aspects of the barking deer’s role in our society.”
To reach her study area, Ilyas had to travel 11 km from an altitude of 1,100 to 2,400 metres above sea level. This would turn out to be really expensive (about Rs 700 per day) so when WWF offered her a motorcycle, the 24-year-old wildlife biologist jumped at the chance. “I said why not! Beggars can’t be choosers,” she laughed. So there she was a young woman “in western clothes, riding a Rajdoot (a Yamaha motorcycle made in India)”, negotiating sharp curves in a terrains. Ilyas said she made quite a sight and her bravado made her popular among the local women. In this way, her two projects went along successfully side-by-side.
Post-doctoral pains
Ilyas finally left Binsar after three years there. She completed her PhD in 2001 and married her husband Pervez, also a professor at AMU today. She won the department of science and technology’s Young Scientist fellowship, with which she went on to studying musk deer as her post-doctoral research in higher altitudes (3,500-4,500 metres above sea level). “I used to trek 35 km, that too very steep! From 900 to 4,000 metres.”
During one such day trekking up, Ilyas found out that she was pregnant. “I was vomiting a lot and after 15 km, a lady at the village I stopped at said ‘madam aapka shaadi ho haye? oh so good news!’” Though she was three months pregnant, Ilyas continued her survey for the next three months. “Once you are on field you have to finish; you can’t just come back.” Thankfully, she had some help. “Indigenous knowledge systems are very strong. The women told me ‘Didi, you can trek, but under your stomach tie a cloth’. I followed their instructions because that’s how they have been surviving!”
Credit: Orus Ilyas
Ilyas came back to Aligarh seven months pregnant, and after some complications her daughter was born a month premature. For six months, Ilyas stayed with her daughter and mother, who was there to help. Then, she was off again because there was still some months of work to finish. When Ilyas returned three months later, she was elated to see how much her daughter had grown. “I left her lying on a bed and came back to her sitting down!” she laughed, eyes lighting up at the memory. These difficult times away from her daughter paid off for Ilyas as her paper got published in an international journal.
Going back to work after pregnancy and delivery was not easy but Ilyas had no doubts that it was what she wanted. Due to the complications she had put on a lot of weight – in fact, during an interview, one of her bosses asked her if she had indeed accomplished all the physically demanding projects in her CV. “With this weight, how did you manage,” he asked. Ilyas took it with a pinch of salt. She replied, “Sir, it is not one’s weight that takes them to the top, it’s motivation and passion. Come with me, I’ll take you to the Everest!”
A liberal upbringing
As one of five sisters in a progressive Muslim family, Ilyas considers herself lucky. “My mother did her graduation in the British period – that was a big deal for a Muslim woman in that time – and from the first day after her marriage, she decide that whatever child she gets, he/she must get education. I was always told to be independent – this should be the first priority – marriage will happen later.”
Nevertheless, she admits that her chosen career path did take some getting used to. “My father never said no, but he considered medicine and teaching the safest professions for women.” But things like wearing jeans and skirts were never a problem – “Back then, nobody objected to such things because we were from a Muslim family. They just said you should know how to carry yourself. This is the kind of confidence I got from my mother.”
Credit: Orus Ilyas
Is Binsar saved?
Ilyas never went back to Binsar but she is keeping track of the villages there. One of her friends, a young postman, tells her the local news about families she interacted with. Today, the area is relatively developed, she said. But problems persist, even if in different forms from what Ilyas encountered in the 90s. “Now the British bungalows have been converted to hotels. So while the dependency of locals has reduced, dependency of tourism has increased.”
Two science journalists have discovered that even though women are doing all kinds of research, there is a visible lack of women scientists in the country.
Two science journalists have discovered that even though women are doing all kinds of research, there is a visible lack of women scientists in the country.
Public lecture held at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Credit: TLoS
This week, we take a break to look back at what we’ve found in the eight months of around 50 interviews with women at scientific institutions in India for our project The Life of Science.
Our crowdfunding campaign is doing great – in fact, we hit our target a month in advance, though the campaign is still open (please continue to contribute, more funds -> more travels -> richer data). And recently, we gave a public lecture at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi about the project and science communication in general. The discussion at the lectures emphasised the urgent need for dialogue. Here are some of the things we are reflecting on.
There are many women in Indian science…
The numbers, though still unsatisfactory for a gender equal space, are much more than suggested by media reports, national awards for scientists and top management at scientific institutes. The lack of women in these publicly visible channels is breeding a misleading perception. This absence of role models for young women considering a future in science does no service to gender equality in the academic world. One of the questions asked at the lecture was, “Are there any scientific disciplines that suit women more?” The answer that we find is no. Women have been and are doing all kinds of research in this country. Examples found on this site show that women, if they possess will and support, can do any kind of research that interests them, be it biotechnology, geology, electronics, physics, sociology, economics, energy, mathematics, ecology.In a nutshell, where you are on the gender rainbow has nothing to do with the aptitude or capability to do science.
… but not enough
There are very few women working at the scientific institutions we have visited. At one of India’s premier science institutes, Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, there are only three women among the seventy scientists. At Banaras Hindu University, there are only two women Deans (Kavita and Ramadevi) in seventeen faculties. More often than not it happens that we are met with the male boss who introduces us to one or two women in the department. When we ask: “Any others?”, “No, that’s it” is the response.
Is the problem starting in the classroom? As one researcher who works in the periphery of linguistics and electronics remarked during the open forum for women scientists that followed our talk at IIT-D, “There are a handful of female students in class. And even these few do not ask any questions during my lectures. You feel like an anomaly [when your kind is so few in number].”
Open forum for women scientists at IIT-D. Credit: TLoS
Having a spouse in science helps
A significant proportion of our married subjects’ spouses are also scientists. Some of these couples, like Monica Bhatnagar, Kusala Rajendran and Prajakta Dandekar are in a scientific partnership with their spouses. Clearly, a ‘science-spouse’ helps women stay in science. Many of our subjects that run their own lab have said that a lot of their female students drop out after settling down with family life. Institutes committed to equality must stay open and make efforts to hire couples, like IISER Pune is doing. Many Indian institutes (including CSIR, some IITs and PRL) have made it difficult for worthy couples to be hired, citing controllable risks of nepotism during promotions or ‘ganging up’.
There is also a notion of ‘competition’ among spouses, as was discussed during the open forum. The panel at the event, composed of six women scientists; all but one, had science-spouses. They agreed that such a problem can be easily managed and have not come in the way of their science or personal lives.
Support system is crucial
In the context of the Indian patriarchal family system – where most of the responsibility of childcare falls on the mother and family life is at the apex of a woman’s priorities – taking up research is hugely challenging. Choosing family life over research life is a major cause for dropping out of academia.
The scientists we have interviewed are either rebelling by putting off marriage or are benefitting from a support system that helps them manage their two lives. This support system comes in form of supportive parents (many help raise children), nannies, maids and importantly creche facilities provided by institutions.
Most scientists we interviewed who mentor female researchers have expressed concern over family expectations of getting married as soon as M.Sc/Ph.D. degree is done with and then abandoning research. As Mayurika Lahiri, a cancer biologist who started a daycare centre at IISER Pune put it, “Standing up to your parents is something most girls are not doing. Especially after so much education, what’s the point of abandoning your real interests?”
There is also something to be said about ‘the need for women to take their own decisions’, which is the one clear scientific finding of studies on women empowerment (two of our subjects have reported this). When women are taking their own decisions about when to get married, when to have children and if to continue their research along with family life, they are more likely to stay in science.
Finding time to do science
Neetu Singh, assistant professor of biomedical sciences at IIT-D, who organised the open forum for women scientists had collected questions from female students in her department. Some of the recurring questions were – “Is it possible to pursue research as a nine-five job? And how can one compete with those who put longer hours in the lab?” suggesting that the prospective scientists seem to be concerned about the time-consuming nature of research.
To this, the panel responded: Science is truly not a nine-five job. Like in Singh’s case, sometimes a midnight lab visit is required to check on growing bacteria. But they all agreed that this is the best part. As Deepti Gupta, Professor of Textile Chemistry and head of Infrastructure Committee at IIT-D said, “perhaps you can’t surf the internet as much.”
Singh added, “But science is actually quite flexible, so you are not bound from nine-five. You have the freedom to do whatever it is you are interested in and manage your timings yourself. If I don’t feel like coming at nine, I won’t. I can come at 11.” Another panellist added that the flexibility in research work also offers work-from-home possibilities. Moreover, all research doesn’t have to be time-consuming. The panel resounded that students must examine their aptitude themselves and decide what makes them happy and choose based on what they truly want to do.
Managing aspirations
In the environment where girls are programmed for their role as caregivers, there seems to be an issue of self-image that doesn’t match with that of a scientist. Amitabha Bagchi, an associate professor in the computer science department, put it eloquently, “We need to tell prospective scientists that research doesn’t demand 100% confidence at every stage.” Sarita Ahlawat, another professor who bounced back into science, weighed with her own example: “I became a serious researcher at 35 after taking a break from science. I followed my husband everywhere and thought he was a better scientist than me. When he was planning his scientific path, I was planning for children – one child at 30, second at 32… Women need to demand help when they needed.” And the panel echoed. In our research, scientific mentors inside the laboratory have also shown to play a big role in bringing the numbers up.
Lack of openness
At a session on science communication with IIT-D students and a few faculty on October 19, we attempted to motivate young scientists to communicate their research as it happens. We provided some tools and tips to help them do this. We will be adding a list of resources here next week. As we travel from one institute to another, we find that science in India is largely operating under the same rules as a golf course: no outsiders allowed. This practice goes against the philosophy of science that is rooted within the sphere of society.
The scientific method of hypothesis and inductive inquiry to get results must remain central while communicating science also. With this in mind, it is possible to break the cycle of unresponsive scientists and irresponsible journalists. Currently, in India, the link between society and science is broken. To fix this public engagement by scientists as blogs, updated websites, citizen science initiatives, outreach events and talking to science journalists can help.
Sexual harassment is hush-hushA poignant moment during the open forum was when a researcher complained about sexually suggestive whistles on campus. To this, the panel responded with disbelief, shaking heads and denial on the basis of campus being a liberal place. “Such a thing would never happen,” they said. Ten minutes later, incidents of physical sexual harassment were brought up by faculty and students, including one incident of harassment at a scientific conference involving a foreign victim. The participant protested against the victim-blaming that ensued after the conference incident. Moreover, the organisers failed to take proper action and the only outcome was a general announcement asking conferences attendees to “behave themselves”.
Deepti Gupta, the only female committee head at IIT testified frankly. She said, “Sexual harassment is a total taboo in committees. We don’t talk about it. Don’t want to face it.” Such a scenario, where the authorities are resigned to sexual harassment is no safe place for anyone to be – man or woman, science or no science.
This piece was originally published by The Life of Science. The Wire is happy to support this project by Aashima Dogra and Nandita Jayaraj, who are travelling across India to meet some fantastic women scientists.
