On February 13, Professor R. L. Brahmachary passed away at the
age of 85. I had known Professor Brahmachary since 1973. He was an
impressive man who bounded with energy, his eyes flashed with excitement
as he spoke. I often sought him out in his lab at the Indian
Statistical Institute. He mentored me, and tried to bring a bit of
discipline to my thoughts, edited my letters I was in the habit of
writing to foreign scientists on their work while I was an undergraduate
student in Calcutta.
Ratan Lal Brahmachary was born in Dhaka, Undivided India, in 1933. He was noticed by Professor S. N. Bose (of Bose-Einstein statistics/Boson fame) when he was an undergraduate student of Physics in Calcutta, a refugee from the newly divided East Pakistan with his widowed mother. On Professor Bose's recommendation, young Brahmachary went to do PhD in physics in Germany (Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Hamburg) shortly after WWII--neither Bose nor Bhrahmachary knew that German physics was in near ruins. Nonetheless, Brahmachary completed his thesis on relativistic field theory in record time in Germany (he published this in 1956 and 1957: "A generalization of Reissner-NordstrÖm solution I" & later "... II). At that time he received a letter from his mother that she was not well. Brahmachary left for India without completing the stipulated residence of 18 months on campus for qualifying for a PhD degree. So he never received his PhD, but had a solid amount of work under his belt worthy of good publications and a glowing recommendation from his German advisor (I don't remember who he was) and also professor Bose.
Brahmachary joined Indian Statistical Institute upon coming to the notice of its founding director, Professor Mohalanobis, the famed physicist/statistician who was once the Cambridge roommate of S. Ramanujan, the mathematics savant. He continued working on field equations (published, "A class of exact solutions of the combined gravitational and electro-magnetic field equations of general relativity" in 1958).
Very soon, Professor J. B. S. Haldane, the last of the English polymaths, joined ISI, and he influenced young Brahmachary's conversion to biology. Upon Haldane's recommendation, Brahmachary went to Paris, to work in Jean Brachet's laboratory, where he did pioneering work on demonstrating that there is a fraction of rather stable RNA in frog's eggs that appeared to be maternally inherited. This was entirely on the basis of fractionating pulse-labeled RNA into oocytes and eggs, at a time when one thought there were only two kinds of RNA--the mRNA (which was just discovered by Sydney Brenner, Jacque Monod, and Francis Crick, and the not-mRNA, which would soon be labeled as rRNA and tRNA by people in Jim Watson's lab. I am talking of 1958-1961.
Returning from Brachet's lab, Brahmachary went on a dizzying bit of activity, in which he worked with sciona, a protochordate, with Acetabularia mediterannia, and also common Indian snail, and showed evidence for the maternal inheritance of stable mRNA into the embryo. This work was collected together into one publication in a somewhat obscure journal, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology in 1968, a copy of which I accidentally picked up in the British Council Library on Theatre Road in Calcutta, when I was a first year undergraduate. That was when I sought him out.
The city was in chaos at the time, with Naxalite, CPI-M, Youth Congress and CRP clashing in dingy lanes and young students disappeared every day. Colleges were closed on many days, classes cancelled, which gave me enough time to take the bus to ISI and talk to Professor Brahmachary and snoop around in his lab. When I moved to JNU in 1975, we kept in touch.
In 1976 he came to New Delhi on a review panel, but took this occasion to come and spend a weekend in my dorm room--we visited the Delhi Zoo and the ravines next to JNU looking for migrating birds. He had taken the slow train from Calcutta to Delhi--the Toofan Mail--because he wanted to estimate the breeding success of the Saras Cranes, the great migratory cranes that winter in northern India, by counting the number of nesting adults and chicks along the railway route. An ingenious idea.
He had by then visited East Africa (Congo, Rwanda/Urundi, and I think Tanzania) some four or five times to study mountain gorillas. Apparently a kind of gorilla he was observing ate only the leaves of the Mufumba tree (I still recall the name, which he pronounced with his characteristic gusto), which, he had determined, had extremely high content of ascorbic acid.
Soon after, he switched his research full time to the study of pheromones in tiger, and became an active player in tiger conservation in eastern India. He and the famous animal behaviorist George Schaller communicated frequently. In 1990, he published a report in Nature on tiger pheromones (Nature 344:26), which had as the main ingredient a fatty acid derivative that was also found in Basmati rice! Here is a clip on his intense dynamism and optimism, as he describes what science is like, at the time of his retirement in 1993. The interviewer is my daughter, who was a fifth-grade student at the time.
Ratan Lal Brahmachary was born in Dhaka, Undivided India, in 1933. He was noticed by Professor S. N. Bose (of Bose-Einstein statistics/Boson fame) when he was an undergraduate student of Physics in Calcutta, a refugee from the newly divided East Pakistan with his widowed mother. On Professor Bose's recommendation, young Brahmachary went to do PhD in physics in Germany (Institut für Theoretische Physik, Universität Hamburg) shortly after WWII--neither Bose nor Bhrahmachary knew that German physics was in near ruins. Nonetheless, Brahmachary completed his thesis on relativistic field theory in record time in Germany (he published this in 1956 and 1957: "A generalization of Reissner-NordstrÖm solution I" & later "... II). At that time he received a letter from his mother that she was not well. Brahmachary left for India without completing the stipulated residence of 18 months on campus for qualifying for a PhD degree. So he never received his PhD, but had a solid amount of work under his belt worthy of good publications and a glowing recommendation from his German advisor (I don't remember who he was) and also professor Bose.
Brahmachary joined Indian Statistical Institute upon coming to the notice of its founding director, Professor Mohalanobis, the famed physicist/statistician who was once the Cambridge roommate of S. Ramanujan, the mathematics savant. He continued working on field equations (published, "A class of exact solutions of the combined gravitational and electro-magnetic field equations of general relativity" in 1958).
Very soon, Professor J. B. S. Haldane, the last of the English polymaths, joined ISI, and he influenced young Brahmachary's conversion to biology. Upon Haldane's recommendation, Brahmachary went to Paris, to work in Jean Brachet's laboratory, where he did pioneering work on demonstrating that there is a fraction of rather stable RNA in frog's eggs that appeared to be maternally inherited. This was entirely on the basis of fractionating pulse-labeled RNA into oocytes and eggs, at a time when one thought there were only two kinds of RNA--the mRNA (which was just discovered by Sydney Brenner, Jacque Monod, and Francis Crick, and the not-mRNA, which would soon be labeled as rRNA and tRNA by people in Jim Watson's lab. I am talking of 1958-1961.
Returning from Brachet's lab, Brahmachary went on a dizzying bit of activity, in which he worked with sciona, a protochordate, with Acetabularia mediterannia, and also common Indian snail, and showed evidence for the maternal inheritance of stable mRNA into the embryo. This work was collected together into one publication in a somewhat obscure journal, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology in 1968, a copy of which I accidentally picked up in the British Council Library on Theatre Road in Calcutta, when I was a first year undergraduate. That was when I sought him out.
The city was in chaos at the time, with Naxalite, CPI-M, Youth Congress and CRP clashing in dingy lanes and young students disappeared every day. Colleges were closed on many days, classes cancelled, which gave me enough time to take the bus to ISI and talk to Professor Brahmachary and snoop around in his lab. When I moved to JNU in 1975, we kept in touch.
In 1976 he came to New Delhi on a review panel, but took this occasion to come and spend a weekend in my dorm room--we visited the Delhi Zoo and the ravines next to JNU looking for migrating birds. He had taken the slow train from Calcutta to Delhi--the Toofan Mail--because he wanted to estimate the breeding success of the Saras Cranes, the great migratory cranes that winter in northern India, by counting the number of nesting adults and chicks along the railway route. An ingenious idea.
He had by then visited East Africa (Congo, Rwanda/Urundi, and I think Tanzania) some four or five times to study mountain gorillas. Apparently a kind of gorilla he was observing ate only the leaves of the Mufumba tree (I still recall the name, which he pronounced with his characteristic gusto), which, he had determined, had extremely high content of ascorbic acid.
Soon after, he switched his research full time to the study of pheromones in tiger, and became an active player in tiger conservation in eastern India. He and the famous animal behaviorist George Schaller communicated frequently. In 1990, he published a report in Nature on tiger pheromones (Nature 344:26), which had as the main ingredient a fatty acid derivative that was also found in Basmati rice! Here is a clip on his intense dynamism and optimism, as he describes what science is like, at the time of his retirement in 1993. The interviewer is my daughter, who was a fifth-grade student at the time.
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