Katalin Karikó, Drew Weissman win Nobel Prize in Medicine for role in Covid-19 vaccines

 

Nobel Prize 2023 in Medicine: Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman win Nobel for mRNA vaccine breakthroughs against COVID-19.

Nobel Prize 2023 in Medicine: Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman were jointly awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their groundbreaking contributions to the development of highly effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. The prestigious recognition underscores the critical role of their discoveries related to nucleoside base modifications in enabling the rapid creation of these vaccines during the pandemic.

The official statement said the transformative impact of the Nobel Laureates' findings on how mRNA interacts with the immune system, led to the unprecedented pace of vaccine development during one of the most significant health crises in recent history.

Vaccination triggers the formation of an immune response against specific pathogens, providing the body with a crucial defence mechanism in the face of future exposure.

Who is Katalin Karikó?

Katalin Karikó, born in 1955 in Szolnok, Hungary, earned her PhD from Szeged University in 1982. She conducted postdoctoral research at institutions including the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Temple University in Philadelphia, and the University of Health Science in Bethesda.

In 1989, she became an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, later assuming leadership roles at BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals.

Since 2021, she has held the position of Professor at Szeged University and Adjunct Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Who is Drew Weissman?

Drew Weissman, born in 1959 in Lexington, Massachusetts, USA, obtained his MD and PhD degrees from Boston University in 1987. He underwent clinical training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School and completed postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health.

In 1997, Weissman established his research group at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he currently serves as the Roberts Family Professor in Vaccine Research and the Director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovations.

What are Nobel Prizes?

These annual Nobel Prizes, spanning physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace, originate from the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish dynamite inventor who passed away in 1896. In 1968, Sweden's central bank introduced the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The Nobel laureates for these esteemed awards are unveiled in Stockholm throughout October, with the exception of the Peace Prize, which is determined by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.

Source: Hindustan Times, 02/10/23

Plant ‘cries’: Recalling Jagadish Chandra Bose

 

Researchers have picked up ‘distress’ calls from plants in difficulty, such as when they need water. More than a century ago, a pioneering Indian scientist had demonstrated that plants can ‘feel’ pleasure and pain.

Late last month, a group of researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel reported that they had been able to pick up distress noises made by plants. The researchers said these plants had been making very distinct, high-pitched sounds in the ultrasonic range when faced with some kind of stress, like when they were in need of water.

This was the first time that plants had been caught making any kind of noise, and the breakthrough research findings made global headlines. But many Indians just had a sense of déjà vu. Several previous generations of Indians had grown up hearing that Jagadish Chandra Bose had shown, more than a century ago, that plants experienced sensations and were able to feel pleasure and pain just like animals. Children were often advised not to pluck leaves, flowers or twigs because that could cause pain to the plants or trees. The discovery that plants ‘cry’ in distress, therefore, did not come as much of a surprise to them. It seemed just a logical extension of J C Bose’s work. Bose might not be a very familiar name to the current generation, but he is a colossal figure of Indian science. A physicist-turned-biologist, Bose, who lived between 1858 and 1937, made pioneering contributions in both the fields and was the first Indian to have made a powerful impact on modern science, much before Srinivasa Ramanujan, C V Raman, or Satyendra Nath Bose, a student of Jagadish, arrived on the scene.

J C Bose could — many believe he deservedly should — very well have been India’s first Nobel Prize winner, ahead of his life-long friend and confidant Rabindranath Tagore, with whom he used to have a prolific, and often poetic, correspondence.

Bose’s science

Jagadish Chandra Bose is remembered for two things — his work on wireless transmission of signals, and on the physiology of plants. He is also credited as one of the first contributors to solid state physics. Sir Neville Mott, Nobel Prize winner in 1977, is said to have remarked that Bose was “at least 60 years ahead of his time and he had anticipated the p-type and n-type semiconductors”, according to an account in Remembering J C Bose, a 2009 publication by D P Sen Gupta, M H Engineer and V A Shepherd.

Bose is widely believed to be the first one to generate electromagnetic signals in the microwave range. In 1895, just a year after he began his active research, he demonstrated, before an audience in Kolkata, how microwaves could be used, wirelessly, to ring an electric bell on the other side of a building. He published as many as 12 papers on radio waves in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, and many more in some other prestigious journals, as reported in the book Jagadis Chandra Bose and the Indian Response to Western Science, by Subrata Dasgupta. He lectured on his work at some highly publicised scientific gatherings in Europe, in the presence of some of the leading scientists of the day. He was the first one to come up with radio receivers, which enabled wireless telegraphy.

And yet, Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian scientist who carried out the first transmission of signals across the Atlantic in 1901, is recognised as the sole inventor of the radio. Marconi, along with another colleague, was awarded the 1909 Nobel Prize for work that Bose is known to have accomplished earlier.

It was not just bias, but as several accounts put it, a reluctance on Bose’s part to obtain patents for his work, that deprived him of the Nobel. As mentioned in the publication Remembering J C Bose, he wrote to Tagore about being approached by a big businessman in Europe with the offer to get his work patented. Bose not just rejected the offer, he felt disgusted at the idea of making money from science. “If only Tagore would witness the country’s (England’s) greed for money,” Bose wrote to Tagore. “What a dreadful, all-consuming disease it was”.

His study of plants

Bose, rather abruptly, changed tack in the initial years of the 20th century and began to focus his attention on plants. But as Professor A S Raghavendra from the University of Hyderabad explained, Bose’s work was not as disjoined as it seems.

“J C Bose was extremely talented at picking electric signals. The other thing he was extremely creative at was making instruments. Bose was working with rudimentary facilities and, yet, was able to build some remarkably sensitive instruments. He used these instruments to try and detect the faintest signals from the plants. He was carrying over his skills from physics to probe the world of biology,” Raghavendra, a former J C Bose National Fellow, who has written extensively on Bose’s work, told The Indian Express.

“His (Bose’s) contributions to the communication systems in biology as well as physics are amazing. He devoted strong attention to studies on the biology of movements, feelings and nervous system. The word ‘feelings’ was used for plants, but clearly this is a matter of semantics; plants react both chemically and physically to touch, but to use the word ‘feeling’ or ‘sensation’ as we know it is quite different. The simple experiments of Bose revealed a high degree of similarity in the responses of plant and animal tissues to external stimuli. This principle was amply demonstrated later by biophysicists, using highly sophisticated instruments,” Raghavendra wrote in a 2010 paper.

In a way, Bose was possibly the world’s first biophysicist. But some of his work became controversial as well, particularly when he claimed that not just plants, even inanimate inorganic matter could respond to stimulus, and that there was actually no sharp demarcation between living and non-living worlds. Such “mental leaps” have sometimes been attributed to Bose’s “deep convictions in Indian philosophy” and his “faith in universalism”. Bose regarded plants to be the “intermediates in a continuum that extended between animals and the non-living materials”, according to the authors of Remembering J C Bose.

His work on plants, too, was also not easily digested. Bose himself records the opposition he faced. In a letter to Tagore, he mentioned a lecture he was delivering in Europe. “When I commented during my lecture at the Royal Society that plants which come between the living and the non-living will provide similar response, (John) Burden Sanderson (a leading physiologist of his time) told me that he had worked all his life with plants. Only mimosa (touch-me-not) responds to touch. That ordinary plants should give electrical response is simply impossible. It cannot be”. Over the years, much of Bose’s work has been confirmed, though his genius is not always acknowledged. “He was much ahead of his times, no doubt. Many of his contemporaries did not fully understand him,” Raghavendra said, adding that the recent discovery of distress noise from plants could lead to some exciting research in the field. “We cannot lose sight of the fact that it was Bose who started it all”.

Written by Amitabh Sinha 

F

Source: The Indian Express, 19/04/23

Know your scientist: Richard Feynman

The American theoretical physicist came up with the idea of nanotechnology and pioneered the field of quantum computing.

Richard Phillips Feynman was born in New York City on May 11, 1918. The American theoretical physicist was best known for discovering the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and his work in quantum mechanics and particle physics. He also came up with the idea of nanotechnology and was one of the earliest pioneers in the field of quantum computing.

His academic achievements include New York University Math Championship which he won during his senior year at Far Rockaway High School, a Bachelor of Science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1939. Despite his intellect, Feynman was an avid prankster, so much so that his autobiography is titled “Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman”.

In 1943, Feynman and Hans Bethe derived the Bethe-Feynman efficiency formula or the formula for calculating the yield of a fission bomb. Feynman also worked on the Manhattan project -- which developed the earliest nuclear weapons -- while he was still a student at Princeton.

The highlight of Richard Feynman career as a scientist was when he won a Nobel prize in 1965. He shared the spotlight with along with fellow scientists Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger. The prize was awarded based on “their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles". He also won the Albert Einstein Award in 1954 and the Lawrence Award in 1962.

Source: DNA, 8-02-2017

Ramanujam biopic: A man who was more than the sum of his parts

On a winter morning nearly 100 years ago, GH Hardy, 35, Cambridge’s rising star in mathematics, received a 10-page ‘Dear Sir’ letter from an Indian clerk, filled with theorems. Some of them suggested that what Hardy had asserted about the orders of infinity, and what the German mathematician Johann Gauss had asserted about prime numbers, was inadequate.

The letter-writer, S Ramanujan, said he could do better.

Dismissing it as a practical joke, Hardy picked up the London Times to follow England’s moves in the world. Politically, England was in a time of turmoil. Mathematically, it was in deep sulk. Isaac Newton’s Principia was still its Bible; it had no time for the Continent’s mathematical breakthroughs. The university system that had produced Newton produced GS Hardy — his mathematics insisted on proof.

Ramanujan, a self-taught 23-year-old whose education and culture was routed through his Tamil-Brahmin way of life, worked by intuition; his theorems, which mathematicians still call ‘good guesses’, bypassed proof. He often credited his results to the family deity, Namagiri.

Nonetheless, Hardy and Ramanujan began to collaborate, with the former facilitating Ramanujan’s tenure in Cambridge. Their collaboration is now the subject of a film, The Man Who Knew Infinity, starring Bafta awardee Dev Patel and Oscar winner Jeremy Irons. The film is based on the 1991 Robert Kanigel book of the same name.

Ramanujan, unsurprisingly, is the reference point among Indian mathematicians for talking up India’s mathematical tradition and why, like him, their personal lives feed off mathematics and vice-versa.

The Indian math tradition seems to be more about pure mathematics than applied. It’s a forced hierarchy, but mathematicians preserve their idealism about the former, says physicist Ranjit Nair.

Ramanujan, physicists almost seem to suggest, could have been one of them. ‘Guessing’, it turns out is important to both disciplines.

“First you guess. Don’t laugh, this is the most important step,” said physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, best known for his work in quantum mechanics.

“Even if you don’t solve a math problem, it can give you new ideas, allow you to see new connections,” says Shanta Laishram a mathematician with the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Delhi. “So when other people rediscovered the proof of Ramanujan’s formulas and identities, it became breakthroughs. Robert Langlands, a famous mathematician at IAS, Princeton, made a number of interesting conjectures; his ideas gThis is perhaps why, when Ramanujan called out Hardy’s ‘mistakes’ in his letter, instead of suppressing it, the latter made it the subject of academic enquiry. He showed it to his colleagues, threw Ramanujan’s questions open in a seminar.

“Mathematics is a democratic space,” says Laishram. “Our job is to ask questions and seek out truth.” Asking questions and having an argument is not the same thing and mathematicians understand that, he adds. “I can tell my guide directly ‘You are wrong for X or Y reason’.”

He doesn’t risk applying the same approach in his private life. “Before I got married, I have had girls cool off me… ‘You ask too many questions!’ my other friends cautioned,” he recalls with a laugh.

If mathematics is the language scientists use to talk to each other, how do they talk to other people? Self-absorption is a common crime, says Antar Bandopadhyay, another ISI mathematician, with a poker face.

Outside of the world of mathematics, mathematicians, says professor A Raghuram of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, are no different from other people. He, too, put on his trousers one leg at a time. Friends, however, titter, when he passes a comment peppered with the linguistic idiosyncrasies common to mathematicians, such as ‘That movie was totally trivial’ or ‘That whiskey has a highly nontrivial taste’, he adds.

(Note: An elementary math equation such as 2 + 2 = 4 can be dismissed as ‘trivial’; new results, whose proof is not immediately evident, are ‘non-trivial’.)

Ramanujan clearly did not make proof the basis of all aspects of his life. Social theorist Ashis Nandy, who in his book, Alternative Sciences (1980), discussed the ‘method’ of two pre-colonial figures of science — Jagadish Chandra Bose and Ramanujan — says Bose tried to join the Vedantic point of view with research findings, to validate his culture through his science. But Ramanujan “did not try to convince himself or others of this connection, even though he was ‘possessed’ by mathematics”.ave new insights for other mathematicians.”

The highest form of truth and beauty is to be found in great theorems, and you may call this God, says professor Raghuram. “My guess is that is what Ramanujan meant by his references to Namagiri. There was no question of her handing out things to him,” agrees professor Ram Murty of Queen’s University, Ontario.

Does that mean God cannot be part of any equation for most mathematicians? In brief: Yes. But Bandopadhyay has his own take on the matter: “Suppose I say God is Green and non-God is Red and I say I believe in Red. Where does that leave me? Neither do I believe nor do I disbelieve. I cannot count out the existence of God nor his non-existence. This is not new in mathematics. In maths, we can have a theory with a postulate and another one with the negation of the postulate.”

Bandopadhyay, however, says there is no problem in upholding religious beliefs, and they do not harm or hamper one’s mathematics. “I have a mathematician friend who is an orthodox Hindu. He performs all the rituals, but his religion makes him humble, opens his mind to other things,” he says.

In these times of religious obscurantism gaining a foothold in the sciences, can mathematics retain its purity? Raghuram, who was one of the resource persons for the documentary The Genius of Srinavasa Ramanujan, says those who talk highly of Vedic Mathematics are unable to see that it was “a bag of tricks to solve a few numerical problems. If studied as an aspect of history, sociology and the culture of a different time, it is fine, but it is no substitute for modern mathematical curricula”.

Nair suggests that when seeking an ‘Indian tradition,’ it would in fact be better to refer to the Jyotisha Vedanga rather than Vedic Maths, which is of much recent origin and does not cite any sources. “In the Vedanga, the Jyotisha meant astronomy/mathematics. In the Sulva Sutras, the Pythagoras theorem in the Indian tradition makes its appearance, at least three or four centuries prior to Pythagoras,” he says.

Source: Hindustan Times, 7-10-2015

Peter Higgs receives world’s oldest scientific prize

Nobel prize winner Peter Higgs has joined the ranks of Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein by winning the world’s oldest scientific prize, the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, for his pioneering work on the theory of the Higgs boson, which was discovered in 2012.

86-year-old Higgs received the Copley Medal for his fundamental contribution to particle physics with his theory explaining the origin of mass in elementary particles, confirmed by the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.

The Copley medal was first awarded by the Royal Society in 1731, 170 years before the first Nobel Prize.

It is awarded for outstanding achievements in scientific research and has most recently been awarded to eminent scientists such as theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, DNA fingerprinting pioneer Alec Jeffreys and Andre Geim, for his discovery of graphene.

Modern physics suggests that matter consists of a set of particles that act as building blocks and that between these particles lie forces that are controlled by another set of particles.

A fundamental property of the majority of particles is that they have a mass.

In 1964, Higgs proposed a theory about the existence of a particle that explains why these other particles have a mass.

At the same time, yet separately, Francois Englert and Robert Brout proposed the same theory.

The existence of the Higgs boson was confirmed by two experiments carried out at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to Higgs and Englert.

“It is an honour to be the recipient this year of the Copley Medal, the Royal Society’s premier award,” Higgs said.

“Peter Higgs is a most deserving winner of the Copley Medal. I congratulate him. His work, alongside that of Francois Englert, has helped shape our fundamental understanding of the world around us,” said Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society.

“The search for the Higgs boson completely ignited the public’s imagination, hopefully inspiring the next generation of scientists. The Copley Medal is the highest honour the Royal Society can give a scientist and Peter Higgs joins the ranks of the world’s greatest ever scientists,” said Sir Nurse.

As well as the Copley Medal, the Royal Society has announced all of the recipients of its awards, medals and prize lectures.

The scientists receive the awards in recognition of their achievements in a wide variety of fields of research.

Keywords: Peter Higgs, Copley Medal, Large Hadron Collider, Higgs boson experiment, God's particle

Giants of Indian science

The Quantum Indians” drives home the point about India’s contribution to science.

Watching the Raja Choudhury-directed 52-minute documentary “The Quantum Indians” definitely swells the pride of Indian viewers and in all probability will inspire a few youngsters to pursue scientific research irrespective of the hurdles.

Produced by Public Service Broadcasting Trust and the Public Diplomacy Division of the Ministry of External Affairs it won the National Film Award for Best Educational Film in 2013. It highlights how in the early part of the 20th Century and over 20 years before India’s independence, three remarkable Indian scientists Satyendra Nath Bose, C.V. Raman and Meghnad Saha revolutionised the worlds of physics and science by giving three remarkable discoveries and theories.

The film explores their individual biographies, collective impact on the world of science and their legacy in Indian science using their own words, archival imagery and footage, interviews with leading Indian scientists and historians and animated visualizations to demonstrate their theories. The Bose-Einstein Statistic, Condensate and Bosons, the Raman Effect and the Saha Equation have been responsible for some major breakthroughs in quantum physics and astrophysics in last and this century. These include the discovery of the Higgs Boson Particle, the splitting of light and the high temperature ionization of elements.

Agreeing that the film seeks to develop and inspire scientific temper among people especially youngsters, Rajiv Mehrotra, executive producer and commissioning editor, says: “There are many Indian scientists who have made a seminal impact after being trained and groomed in India. The three scientists in the film will inspire people and imbibe hope in them that they too can excel in scientific exploration and investigation after studying, training and grooming in India.” Bose and Saha did M.Sc from Calcutta University while Raman did M.A. from Presidency College Madras. Incidentally, all three taught initially at the University of Calcutta, became members of the Royal Society and Raman went on to win India’s only Nobel Prize for Science.

Remarkable it is to know that Bose sent his paper to Albert Einstein leading to half the particles in this whole world named after him. Similarly Raman who did have a spectrograph wrote to G.D. Birla requesting him for funds to buy one and assuring him that his discovery will definitely land a Nobel Prize. Saha who became a leading astrophysicist initiated creation of Planning Commission and laid emphasis on nuclear energy.

Choudhury has not limited himself to laboratories in portraying the genius of the three Indians but has also highlighted different aspects of their personalities. Bose championed teaching of science in mother tongue to break the language barrier. He was a kind-hearted person who shared food with famine stricken children. Raman, who is credited of guiding several well known Indian scientists, was a great teacher but an intolerant perfectionist who loved children. Saha stands out for fighting against all odds and poverty before he went on to establish the Institute of Nuclear Physics, the first of its kind in India and organising the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science. The scientists were not untouched by the freedom movement in the country and after Independence were committed to nation building. Receiving his Nobel Prize (1930) was hurt by the absence of the Indian flag at the ceremony and remarked that he could not claim to be an Indian there. He dedicated the prize to the freedom fighters of Indian who according to him were spending the golden time of their life in British jails.

Though PSBT movies are shown on different channels of Doordarshan, documentaries like “The Quantum Indians” need to be screened in educational institutions. It requires exposure which can be provided by various Government institutions and also by public-private partnership efforts. Despite critical acclaim such movies which are available for on Internet and for non-commercial display still remain unseen by a vast majority.

Thanking the Prince of Mathematics: Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Gauss a prodigy mathematician born to a poor, working class parents in Brauschweig, Germany surprised his elementary school teacher by adding all the integers from 1 to 100 simply by observing that the sum of 50 pairs of numbers is 101. The story goes that he had figured that 100 numbers could be determined by the equation n(a+b)(1/2)=50(a+b) where n=100, a = the first digit in the sequence and b = the last digit in the sequence.

His mathematical talent befuddled his teachers and mentors such that he grew up to become an influential mathematician of his century.
Gauss’s wide range of discoveries, from his fundamental theorem of algebra to his ground breaking work in number theory has shaped the field to the present day.

The true genius of his work, experts think is how he ultimately took these theories and applied them to in many fields, including number theory, statistics, analysis, differential geometry, electrostatics, astronomy and optics.

He once wrote, “All the measurements in the world are not worth one theorem by which the science of eternal truth is genuinely advanced.” It was at the same time he took up the job of geodesic survey mapping irregularly shaped curved surfaces across the country.  Although, he failed to produce an accurate map of Hannover, he succeeded in creating a number of important advances in mathematics of curved surfaces, development of curvilinear coordinates and established ideas on non Euclidean geometry. 

To which Einstein later wrote, "If Gauss had not created his geometry of surfaces, which served Riemann as a basis, it is scarcely conceivable that anyone else would have discovered it. The importance of Gauss for the development of modern physical theory and especially for the mathematical fundamentals of the theory of relativity is overwhelming indeed."

Gauss’s list of discoveries extends to modular arithmetic, prime numbers, number theory, squares, quadratic reciprocity etc. But it was more astonishing that he worked on these discoveries independently without any collaborators or co workers!

This Thanksgiving lets be grateful to the man who overcame all the difficulties while pursuing mathematics and continued to discover more and more fundamentals that shaped the field to what it is today!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Oct 22 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

Govt ups scholarship for scientists by 50%

Vishwa Mohan

New Delhi:





In what may motivate young scientists to continue their research work in India, without being lured by greener pastures abroad, the government on Tuesday announced hike of over 50% in the fellowship amount received by various categories of research scientists.The hike, which comes into force from this month itself, could help curb brain drain by boosting the research environment in the country .
Nearly one lakh science research scholars and associates, working in different institutions across the country , will be benefited from this move of the ministry of science and technology that comes just two days ahead of Diwali.
Accordingly , the fellowship amount for research associate-III has been increased from Rs 24,000 to Rs 40,000, research associate-II from Rs 23,000 to Rs 38,000, research associate-I from Rs 22,000 to Rs 36,000, senior research fellow from Rs 18,000 to Rs 28,000 and junior research fellow from Rs16,000 to Rs 25,000 per month, respectively .
In addition, the house rent allowance (HRA) as well as the medical benefits will continue to be available to all the categories of research scholars as per the central government norms or the norms of host institutions whichever applicable.
Entitlement for travel by AC-2 tier or AC-3 tier depending upon the category of research fellow or research associate will also be available to the young scientists. Besides, maternity leave for women research scholars will also be available to all categories of research fellows.
The central government also issued directions to the science and technology ministry to put in place a “web-based fellowship assessment and disbursement mechanism“ so that delays in disbursement of fellowship amount could be avoided.
Announcing the decision, Union minister of state for science and technology Jitendra Singh said, “Each ministry and agency can now use the guidelines to make requisite changes over their specific fellowship programmes and courses.“
He also suggested that a hike in the fellowship amount should be undertaken periodically after due assessment and for this purpose the ministry would put in place a proper mechanism. The decision will put an additional burden of about Rs 750 crore on the exchequer.

Outreach plans for scientists

The decision of the Union Minister of Science and Technology to tap the talent pool of about 6,000 scientists from institutions and centres that come under the umbrella of the Department of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Earth Sciences and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research to give lectures to school and college students is a good initiative. Scientists dedicating 12 hours a year each to engage with students to impart scientific knowledge and inculcate a scientific temper in them is bound to go a long way in attracting young talent to science and grooming them. This is a much-needed step as India, like several other countries, faces an alarming situation of steadily decreasing numbers of school students opting for science, and a lack of long-term interest among those who have chosen it. While the intent behind the initiative is good, a coordinated approach by different Ministries would be more effective in achieving the goal. Not involving scientists from the 32 institutions of the Indian Council of Medical Research and similar nodal bodies is unjustified. The lapse becomes all the more glaring as the outreach programmes are to be made mandatory and scientists’ performance is to be evaluated once every three years. As it stands, the initiative could cause resentment among the 6,000 scientists as their counterparts in institutions that come under other nodal agencies face no such compulsions. The government should act swiftly to ensure that all the scientists working in government institutions become involved in student outreach programmes. The metrics of their performance can be used to reward them while assessing their research proposals and promotions.

Several institutions and individuals in the U.S. engage in student outreach programmes and India has a great deal to learn from their experience. We should make sure that as we belatedly embark on this ambitious goal, we conscientiously avoid committing the same mistakes that have been seen elsewhere. The first and foremost pitfall to be avoided is compelling scientists to teach science by replacing teachers. Teaching should be made active rather than passive. Excellent results can be achieved when scientists guide students and teachers to do real science that is open-ended, inquiry-based and driven by a sense of exploration — which only scientists are best-equipped to offer. This will foster critical thinking and imagination and impart skills of scientific investigation. Also, it will arouse children’s curiosity and set off a series of questions prior to, during and after a project. Information and knowledge thus gained remain indelible, and science becomes fun. The Indian Space Research Organisation’s work of guiding students from a handful of engineering colleges to build satellites, which were eventually launched, is one of the best examples of imaginative student outreach programmes.

Keywords: CSIR, Scientists, Researchers, Schools, Colleges, HRD Ministry, KIRAN, free lectures

Sep 09 2014 : The Times of India (Delhi)

5,000 govt scientists to teach in schools, colleges

New Delhi: TIMES NEWS NETWORK





The government has decided to make it mandatory for over 5,000 scientists, working in different central agencies including the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), to undertake 12 hours of lecture classes in an academic year in public-funded schools and colleges across the country .Announcing the decision, Union science and technology minister Jitendra Singh said it would be “mandatory“ for the scientists to formally take classes in schools and colleges which would be identified for this purpose in coordination with the ministry of human resources development. The minister said this kind of engagement would be “free of any honorarium“.
He said the government was devising a methodology depending upon the scientists' area of interest, area of excellence and specialisation.
The minister also announced a special promotion scheme-KIRAN (Knowledge, Involvement, Research, Advancement through Nurturing) for women scientists “to bring about, as far as possible, gender parity in the field of science and technology“.
“There are a number of women scientists who have inevitable break in the continuous career...we are trying to evolve a mechanism (to see) that we don't lose out to them and they don't lose out to us,“ Singh said while listing initiatives of his ministry.
Giving a detailed account of the achievements and initiatives taken in the first 100 days of Narendra Modi government, Singh said the ministries under his charge had been able to scale-up scientific research to address several key socio-economic issues. This has been achieved by collaborating with other ministries while making a concerted effort to build scientific temper among the youth.
Highlighting specific achievements, he said that the department of science and technology got approval of Expenditure Finance Committee for India's participation in Thirty Meter Telescope project involving astronomy research institutes in India, US, Canada, Japan and China.

Saluting India's Science Legends [Infographic]

Mt. Sinha, a mountain in Antarctia is named in honor of Akhouri Sinha, an eminent Indian-American scientist, whose pioneering biological research expedition has provided critical data about animal populations.

Recently, two Indian-origin scientists, Shubhroz Gill and Satchidananda Panda have discovered the gene that regulates sleeping and waking patterns.

Last year, India sent its Mars Orbiter Mission to the red planet, which will demonstrate technological capability for future interplanetary missions. The project cost amounts to just US$75 million, a very economical spending, compared to the mammoth budgets of other space agencies. 

This is not the first time you are coming across this, you may have read this praise nauseum for quite a long time.  Yet, every time you read it, you feel a sense of pride surging in you.

Every country has its own sets of heroes, what is so different about India?

Without swaying into jingoism, Mark Twain’s quote, “India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, and the grandmother of legend and the great grandmother of tradition” does perfect justice to this question.

Indians are known for their minds. They have successfully earned respect of the entire world in every department, be it sports, science, technology or innovation. India has also given the world some of the best scientists who have done a great deal of work and achieved the top most level in their fields. Not only this, but they have also famed the country globally.

Let us celebrate this 68th Indian independence by remembering these scientists who gave the world, so much.