A brief history of IISc hostels To the south-west of the IISc Main Building, a stone’s throw away stands a rather squat piece of architecture. The ground floor construction is of grey-brown rock, cut and piled in rectangles of various sizes. The first floor is painted with what must have been a shade of […]
How its understanding has changed through the years The year was 1919. May was approaching and so was graduation season at the University of California, Berkeley in the USA. A young undergraduate student was in deep distress. One of his professors, William Bray, had assigned a paper to be submitted before the end of […]
The enduring legacy of the JRD Tata Memorial Library In the late hours of the night, the bustling and lively IISc campus halts to a slight murmur. The streets are deserted; the silence is broken only by the slow pacing of the night guards and dogs barking at nothing in particular. In this dark […]
Can it help us understand the unknown universe? One day in the spring of 1543, a canon named Nicolaus Copernicus, lying on his sickbed, suddenly awoke from a coma that he had been put under because of a brain stroke. Resting beside him was the first copy of his magnum opus: De revolutionibus orbium […]
How NS Govinda Rao laid the foundation for civil engineering A photo of a moustachioed bespectacled man looks down from the wall of the office of the Department of Civil Engineering at IISc. A few steps further, in the Chairperson’s office, another portrait watches on from above the door. It is fitting that NS […]
How did life emerge on Earth? (Spoiler alert: We still don’t know) On a cold winter evening in 1952, in a dimly lit lab at the University of Chicago, Stanley Miller, a 22-year-old graduate student, stared at the murky brown sludge in the shake flask in front of him, his stomach sinking. Days of […]
Gursaran Pran Talwar blazed trails in indigenous vaccine development In October 1994, Gursaran Pran Talwar was in a fix. He had only a month to leave the National Institute of Immunology (NII), an organisation that he had built from the ground up, as his tenure was coming to an end. But his work […]
Tracing the contributions of IISc scientists Danish physicist Niels Bohr once had a visitor at his country cottage at Tisvilde. Seeing a horseshoe nailed above the front door, the visitor was amused and asked Bohr if he believed in the superstition that it brought luck. Bohr apparently replied: “No, I certainly do not […]
Why the oldest department in IISc continues to be relevant As one goes down the canopy-covered Tala Marg in IISc, there stands a building tucked unobtrusively on the right side. The exposed stone bricks, sharp features, and small windows harken back to a time when robustness and utility were qualities that were paramount. Even […]
