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 […]
The need for archives in academic institutions In a pivotal scene in the sensational Christopher Nolan film, Oppenheimer, the protagonist, J Robert Oppenheimer, meets Danish physicist Niels Bohr while struggling with his research at Cambridge University in the early 1920s. Bohr urges Oppenheimer to move to Germany and study under the famed physicist and […]
“He was a man who devoted his life to developing new areas and institutions of science and technology” In 1966, when Arkal Shenoy travelled to the US to join a PhD programme at the Georgia Institute of Technology, after completing his Master’s from the Department of Mechanical Engineering (ME) at IISc, he didn’t have his […]
The first head of the Department of Biochemistry was one of the most consequential researchers of his time Gilbert John Fowler wore many scientific hats: he was a chemist, a biologist and an environmental scientist – decades before environmental science became an active field of scientific investigation. He even fancied himself as an economist. […]
HS Savithri graduated with a PhD from the Department of Biochemistry in 1976. After a short stint abroad, she returned to the same department, where she worked on the architecture, genome organisation and expression of plant viruses, before becoming the first and only woman to be Chair of the department. On the occasion of the […]
G Padmanaban has spent decades trying to understand the lifecycle of the malaria parasite and develop a cure A few years ago, researchers from Michigan State University tracking malaria in Malawi made a gut-wrenching discovery. The reason why many children with cerebral malaria were dying was because their brain was swelling up so much […]
Experiments in PS Sarma’s lab at the Department of Biochemistry in the 1960s explored a mystery disease caused by excess consumption of seeds of a controversial pulse crop For many years, the Department of Biochemistry at IISc worked extensively on nutrition. Its researchers have analysed the importance of vitamin B1 in our diet. They […]
