My first stirrings, so far as I remember, came when I happened to get my fifth year birthday present from my mother, a book (in Bengali) called Manus Elo Kotha-hote? (How did man come about?). The book was a treat. Until then I had never heard of dinosaurs; there was no TV show (I had not seen a TV until I was 17 years old), no radio program on dinosaurs, no books on dinosaurs before this one; my parents and relations had never studied science, so they did not talk about dinosaurs—in fact I doubt they even knew of their existence before I got the book, which they also read along with me.
By the time I was in fourth grade, I was reading science fiction stories translated from other languages into Bengali. I remember specifically “The Time Machine” and “From the Earth to the Moon”. Around this time, perhaps when still in the third grade, I had accidentally discovered that when colored plant parts, such as green leaves and stems or flower petals, are pounded into a mash, mixed with fountain-pen ink, bottled and put into a dark place, they change color—-sometimes the ink becomes discolored, sometimes the blue ink became red or straw yellow, or the red ink became orange. I was doing this because I loved to paint but had access to limited pigment colors for doing watercolor. So I thought mixing plant parts with ink might generate interesting color varieties. But the process was messy, and I did not want people to throw the mixtures away. So I put them in a box and hid them within a drainpipe between my bedroom and the balcony, thinking that no one will try to clean the dry drain pipe. Well, that led to my observations on the fascinating changes of color with time, which caused no end of wonder, and I did not figure out why this occurred until late in college.
But there were other leads. I loved animals; specifically, I used to watch birds, which were plentiful in variety in the little tropical town where I lived. I first became aware of the serious dangers that wild flora and fauna in India faced around the time I was in the eighth grade, through readings in Sandesh, the monthly literary magazine for children which was edited by Satyajit Ray, the noted film director from Bengal. A Bengali naturalist whose pen name was "Jeevan Sardar", frequently wrote a column whose title I no longer remember. I do not know who he was, but my guess is that he might have been someone in the Bose Institute. In any case, his writings deeply influenced me when I was in middle school, and his column was instrumental in my choosing science at the end of the eighth grade--before that, I was quite set on becoming an archeologist and was going to study history.
Jeevan Sardar used to take long walks in the Dum Dum and Salt Lake areas, and he described over the years how birds and small mammals were disappearing. Remember that in the early 1960s the Salt Lake areas of Calcutta were quite deserted, mostly marshland devoid of settlements; Jeevan Sardar described how the place had been changing over the past several decades since he was a young man. Subsequently, I became an avid follower of the natural history columns in Science Today and Science Reporter, two monthly popular science magazines published in India. While in high school, I would escape from classes and go to the riverside to collect fossils, rocks, catch mud skinks, and watch dolphins dunking in the water.
By the time I was in the 11th grade, I became passionately interested in nature conservation. But I had also realized that nature conservation was a full-time career, and I was not sure whether I had the right 'stuff' for it.
While also in the 10th grade I had a chance encounter with an old copy of the Life magazine, from the early sixties, with Sophia Loren on the cover—Princess from Hong Kong was released then—right next to it on my uncle's magazine rack was another copy of the Life in which there was an article on the new science of immunology. There was a two-page spread of a ball and stick model of an antibody molecule.
That was a watershed moment. The dry pages of organic chemistry I was cramming for my high school examinations came alive with that article. I am yet to decide which was more attractive to me at the time, Sophia Loren or the model of antibody!
I decided that I must do what these ‘scientists’ do—the whole concept of a scientist being incredibly romantic to me, having never seen any scientist in real life at that time. In another year, I accidentally came upon “The Double Helix” by Watson in the British Council Library on Theatre Road, whose Rs.15 annual membership I purchased (which my father approved reluctantly) because it was the only library where I could access the book stacks by myself, to which I would walk a mile from home, take a train for an hour, take a bus for 40 minutes, then walk another few miles, and return the same way, on the days that I didn’t have classes in school because the Maoist extremists had shut them shut down. I am forever grateful to the Maoists for making possible these trips; otherwise, I would probably have become a physician in a provincial town. The Double Helix sealed my future.
I discussed this with Dr. Sivatosh Mukherjee, then the head of the department of Zoology in Presidency College, when I was in 11th grade (having been introduced to him by a Ph.D. student of his from Chandernagore), even before I was admitted to Presidency as a first-year student, and suggested to him a hare-brained idea about finding out why certain 'cold blooded' animals were disappearing faster than others--having to do with their being immune-compromised due to greenhouse effect and high temperature (in 1970-71, they had already detected massive greenhouse effects, and popular science magazines were awash with articles about them).
Professor Mukherjee was amused but not discouraging. He suggested I talk to Dr. Kanailal Mukherjee (KLM), a professor of immunology in the department of biochemistry of Calcutta University.
From Chandernagore I took the train, and a long journey by bus to somewhere near Park Circus, spending nearly four hours each way, to his research lab in a clinic. After trying to get his appointment (I had no access to telephones in those days) for three weeks (so 3 visits), I finally got his audience. Perhaps he was impressed by my perseverance, and so had felt bad to avoid me any longer. I am sure he knew the naïveté of my idea, yet he was encouraging to the extent that he invited me to work in his lab along with one of his female Ph.D. students.
The student was quite attractive but totally ruthless in critiquing me while I made numerous mistakes, but she also used to bring delicious food for me because she knew I used to come from very far away and did not have much money. Unfortunately, I do not recall her name any longer. I shadowed her for 3 months, 3 days a week; in this, I was lucky because our school was closed indefinitely--those 3 months, as it turned out--due to Maoist Naxalite disturbances.
At the end of the year, I wrote up my National Science Talent exam's project report based on this research experience--no results really, but it had an original theory, an equation that I proposed: however naive it was, it was my own. I got the scholarship. Based on this I convinced my father that I did not want to be a physician, and so despite having obtained admission to medical colleges, I went to study science at Presidency. My chief interest was to become a molecular biologist, with the view of understanding how the environment affects life.
While in Presidency, I along with my friends organized a weekly seminar program on current progress in biology at the nearby United States Information Service library. This little library was clearly a listening post of the CIA on the political pulse of Bengal; however, it suited our purpose quite well because they would bend over backward to entertain us.
During the summer after my first year in college, I went to Delhi University and worked for a few months in the laboratory of Professor S. Duraiswami, a biochemist trained in U. Wisconsin, Madison. It was a most incredible experience for me. Professor Duraiswami treated me as an adult and opened the whole lab to me. He told me to do whatever I wanted. I read random papers for a while, then decided to study the binding of actinomycin D, an antibiotic, with DNA. I designed two biophysical experiments, one involving viscometry, another using equilibrium binding kinetics through spectrophotometric shifts in absorbance. I worked out the algebra and conducted the experiments successfully.
One incident I vividly remember. He gave me an Ostwald viscometer and told me not to break it. Within a few hours, I broke it. He smiled, gave me another one, and told me that now that I knew how to break it I would not break another one. Indeed, he was right. This simple philosophy has since guided my own behavior with respect to my students when many years later I had my own laboratory.
Upon returning to Presidency college, I fast-talked our head of the department into giving me a corner of his laboratory, a viscometer, and some chemicals, to study the hydrodynamics of protein shape change as a function of partitioning into two polar solvents. Unfortunately, this was too ambitious for the modest facilities we had and my limitation of knowledge of statistical mechanics. The latter I had to acquire entirely by reading by myself and talking to a senior student of physical chemistry whom I happened to know because he came from the same town as I did; so these experiments, although fun, did not go anywhere.
I end here, because after graduating with a B.Sc. I went to New Delhi, which is a different chapter in my life.
By the time I was in fourth grade, I was reading science fiction stories translated from other languages into Bengali. I remember specifically “The Time Machine” and “From the Earth to the Moon”. Around this time, perhaps when still in the third grade, I had accidentally discovered that when colored plant parts, such as green leaves and stems or flower petals, are pounded into a mash, mixed with fountain-pen ink, bottled and put into a dark place, they change color—-sometimes the ink becomes discolored, sometimes the blue ink became red or straw yellow, or the red ink became orange. I was doing this because I loved to paint but had access to limited pigment colors for doing watercolor. So I thought mixing plant parts with ink might generate interesting color varieties. But the process was messy, and I did not want people to throw the mixtures away. So I put them in a box and hid them within a drainpipe between my bedroom and the balcony, thinking that no one will try to clean the dry drain pipe. Well, that led to my observations on the fascinating changes of color with time, which caused no end of wonder, and I did not figure out why this occurred until late in college.
But there were other leads. I loved animals; specifically, I used to watch birds, which were plentiful in variety in the little tropical town where I lived. I first became aware of the serious dangers that wild flora and fauna in India faced around the time I was in the eighth grade, through readings in Sandesh, the monthly literary magazine for children which was edited by Satyajit Ray, the noted film director from Bengal. A Bengali naturalist whose pen name was "Jeevan Sardar", frequently wrote a column whose title I no longer remember. I do not know who he was, but my guess is that he might have been someone in the Bose Institute. In any case, his writings deeply influenced me when I was in middle school, and his column was instrumental in my choosing science at the end of the eighth grade--before that, I was quite set on becoming an archeologist and was going to study history.
Jeevan Sardar used to take long walks in the Dum Dum and Salt Lake areas, and he described over the years how birds and small mammals were disappearing. Remember that in the early 1960s the Salt Lake areas of Calcutta were quite deserted, mostly marshland devoid of settlements; Jeevan Sardar described how the place had been changing over the past several decades since he was a young man. Subsequently, I became an avid follower of the natural history columns in Science Today and Science Reporter, two monthly popular science magazines published in India. While in high school, I would escape from classes and go to the riverside to collect fossils, rocks, catch mud skinks, and watch dolphins dunking in the water.
By the time I was in the 11th grade, I became passionately interested in nature conservation. But I had also realized that nature conservation was a full-time career, and I was not sure whether I had the right 'stuff' for it.
While also in the 10th grade I had a chance encounter with an old copy of the Life magazine, from the early sixties, with Sophia Loren on the cover—Princess from Hong Kong was released then—right next to it on my uncle's magazine rack was another copy of the Life in which there was an article on the new science of immunology. There was a two-page spread of a ball and stick model of an antibody molecule.
That was a watershed moment. The dry pages of organic chemistry I was cramming for my high school examinations came alive with that article. I am yet to decide which was more attractive to me at the time, Sophia Loren or the model of antibody!
I decided that I must do what these ‘scientists’ do—the whole concept of a scientist being incredibly romantic to me, having never seen any scientist in real life at that time. In another year, I accidentally came upon “The Double Helix” by Watson in the British Council Library on Theatre Road, whose Rs.15 annual membership I purchased (which my father approved reluctantly) because it was the only library where I could access the book stacks by myself, to which I would walk a mile from home, take a train for an hour, take a bus for 40 minutes, then walk another few miles, and return the same way, on the days that I didn’t have classes in school because the Maoist extremists had shut them shut down. I am forever grateful to the Maoists for making possible these trips; otherwise, I would probably have become a physician in a provincial town. The Double Helix sealed my future.
I discussed this with Dr. Sivatosh Mukherjee, then the head of the department of Zoology in Presidency College, when I was in 11th grade (having been introduced to him by a Ph.D. student of his from Chandernagore), even before I was admitted to Presidency as a first-year student, and suggested to him a hare-brained idea about finding out why certain 'cold blooded' animals were disappearing faster than others--having to do with their being immune-compromised due to greenhouse effect and high temperature (in 1970-71, they had already detected massive greenhouse effects, and popular science magazines were awash with articles about them).
Professor Mukherjee was amused but not discouraging. He suggested I talk to Dr. Kanailal Mukherjee (KLM), a professor of immunology in the department of biochemistry of Calcutta University.
From Chandernagore I took the train, and a long journey by bus to somewhere near Park Circus, spending nearly four hours each way, to his research lab in a clinic. After trying to get his appointment (I had no access to telephones in those days) for three weeks (so 3 visits), I finally got his audience. Perhaps he was impressed by my perseverance, and so had felt bad to avoid me any longer. I am sure he knew the naïveté of my idea, yet he was encouraging to the extent that he invited me to work in his lab along with one of his female Ph.D. students.
The student was quite attractive but totally ruthless in critiquing me while I made numerous mistakes, but she also used to bring delicious food for me because she knew I used to come from very far away and did not have much money. Unfortunately, I do not recall her name any longer. I shadowed her for 3 months, 3 days a week; in this, I was lucky because our school was closed indefinitely--those 3 months, as it turned out--due to Maoist Naxalite disturbances.
At the end of the year, I wrote up my National Science Talent exam's project report based on this research experience--no results really, but it had an original theory, an equation that I proposed: however naive it was, it was my own. I got the scholarship. Based on this I convinced my father that I did not want to be a physician, and so despite having obtained admission to medical colleges, I went to study science at Presidency. My chief interest was to become a molecular biologist, with the view of understanding how the environment affects life.
While in Presidency, I along with my friends organized a weekly seminar program on current progress in biology at the nearby United States Information Service library. This little library was clearly a listening post of the CIA on the political pulse of Bengal; however, it suited our purpose quite well because they would bend over backward to entertain us.
During the summer after my first year in college, I went to Delhi University and worked for a few months in the laboratory of Professor S. Duraiswami, a biochemist trained in U. Wisconsin, Madison. It was a most incredible experience for me. Professor Duraiswami treated me as an adult and opened the whole lab to me. He told me to do whatever I wanted. I read random papers for a while, then decided to study the binding of actinomycin D, an antibiotic, with DNA. I designed two biophysical experiments, one involving viscometry, another using equilibrium binding kinetics through spectrophotometric shifts in absorbance. I worked out the algebra and conducted the experiments successfully.
One incident I vividly remember. He gave me an Ostwald viscometer and told me not to break it. Within a few hours, I broke it. He smiled, gave me another one, and told me that now that I knew how to break it I would not break another one. Indeed, he was right. This simple philosophy has since guided my own behavior with respect to my students when many years later I had my own laboratory.Upon returning to Presidency college, I fast-talked our head of the department into giving me a corner of his laboratory, a viscometer, and some chemicals, to study the hydrodynamics of protein shape change as a function of partitioning into two polar solvents. Unfortunately, this was too ambitious for the modest facilities we had and my limitation of knowledge of statistical mechanics. The latter I had to acquire entirely by reading by myself and talking to a senior student of physical chemistry whom I happened to know because he came from the same town as I did; so these experiments, although fun, did not go anywhere.
I end here, because after graduating with a B.Sc. I went to New Delhi, which is a different chapter in my life.
