The good news

First, the good news. The funding scenario for science in India is better than ever, with lots of infrastructure, startup funds and facilities provided to young aspiring professors. A major recent initiative has been the creation of the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) whose primary goal has been to meld undergraduate education with research, something that’s traditionally been almost completely missing in India. Expensive new centers including a neutrino observatory, a clean nanotechnology lab and most impressively, an open-source tuberculosis drug discovery project are highlighting India’s ambition and capabilities to focus on relevant and cutting edge fields.

In addition there’s a surplus of faculty positions at some top institutes that will make faculty candidates in Western countries feel jealous. A great example is the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bangalore which provides a premier research environment. Many of these institutes have year-round hiring. There are also a few lucrative fellowships designed to attract expatriate Indians back to their country to set up their labs. Some of them allow you to start a lab anywhere that you want in the country. Purely in terms of facilities and funding, this is a good time to do academic science in India. And after a long, fallow period of scientific entrepreneurship, there are finally opportunities for Indian scientists to turn their discoveries into profits, although time would tell how efficient the system is in reality.

In addition, being an assistant professor (or any higher middle-class working professional for that matter) in India has its perks; one gets cheap access to maids who will cook and clean for your family and a driver who will drive you around. The maids will also double as baby-sitters and will occasionally shop for your groceries. Science institutes in India often offer highly subsidized housing and meals. Adjusting for these perks and for purchasing power parity, it’s not a big exaggeration to say that being an assistant professor in a top Indian research university is a comfortable prospect.

The bad news

Now the bad news, which unfortunately points to some rather deep structural problems which have beset Indian science education and research since its post-independence conception. To gain some insight into these it’s worth looking at some history.

For a developing country India has always been pretty big on science. Nobel Prize winners like H. G. Khorana (who died a few months back) and C. V. Raman emerged from the old education system which was modeled after the British system. In some fields like statistics India has consistently produced world-class researchers. After India became independent in 1947, science was one of the top priorities for the country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, a Cambridge-educated lawyer. Even today Nehru remains India’s most scientifically literate leader and he was instrumental in establishing both the well-known Indian Institutes of Technology and several leading federal research laboratories.

Unfortunately, Nehru’s undoubtedly visionary outlook on science was severely crippled by his equally fervent belief in Soviet-style socialism. While this did not lead to the genocidal horrors seen in the Soviet Union and China, it did lead to forty years or so of socialist “reforms” and “five-year plans” modeled on the Soviet system of education under which science and especially basic science floundered. Constraints were tightly imposed both on funding and on financial incentives for Indian scientists. Scientific entrepreneurship leading to intellectual property was virtually non-existent. Keeping in line with the Soviet system however, there was heavy investment in both atomic energy and the space program and India emerged as a leading power in these sectors. Today there is a nuclear weapons complex, but more promisingly there is advanced nuclear reactor research trying to produce electricity from thorium. And as the article notes, the advanced status of the space program has led India to make ambitious plans for a manned moon landing.

But basic science has been neglected, and even after the opening up of Indian markets in the early 90s, the old system remains deeply ingrained in Indian science primarily in two debilitating ways.

Indian education: A riddle wrapped in a straitjacket

One huge hurdle is in the form of extremely limited undergraduate science education that still heavily relies on rote memorization without true understanding, discourages teamwork and most importantly, is almost completely uncoupled from research. As the articles note, this is most obvious in the large number of state-run universities in India that provide the bulk of the science education in the country. Almost no Indian state-run university offers decent research opportunities for undergraduates, a pronounced oversight that is starting to be remedied by institutes like the IISERs but still on a very small scale. An interesting contrast is that compared to top science institutes which can be awash in funds and facilities, state-run schools remain not just woefully under-equipped but blatantly ignorant of safety regulations. It is not uncommon to find chemistry labs even at respectable colleges without a single fume hood inside them.

In addition, the curriculum in most of these places is outdated. For instance, much of the biology curriculum still asks students to memorize intricate details of invertebrate anatomy and physiology. Physical chemistry courses include outdated textbooks from the 1950s by Samuel Glasstone and Bruce Mahan (these are classics and were excellent textbooks for their time, but they cannot be part of a modern chemical education that is supposed to prepare students for a research career). Physics is full of tuning forks, inclined plains and Wheatstone bridges. The notebooks of organic chemistry students still devote reams of paper to structure determination by chemical degradation of the kind that was done before spectroscopic techniques became available. A similar situation exists in the laboratory, with many experiments and apparatus looking quaint and outdated. To be sure there are chapters on molecular biology, protein chemistry, NMR spectroscopy, quantum chemistry, combinatorial chemistry and other modern topics, but they are mostly reserved for graduate level courses, and one wonders why undergraduates are expected to be steeped in all that outdated material.

However, the bigger problem in the Indian education system may not even be this lack of research opportunities for science undergraduates but the more general blinkered education that Indian college students are forced to endure. To begin with, the system has defined an extremely strange and regressive compartmentalization of education that seems to dissuade any kind of flexibility in learning, let alone in interdisciplinary study. It is no secret that ever since India opened up its markets and globalization brought West and East under the same economic umbrella, there has been a steady demand for Indian engineers and technical professionals in the West. But this has also led to a highly skewed bias toward engineering, medical and business education in the country. Importantly, it has manifested itself in the proliferation and segregation of professional universities from those offering science and humanities courses. This means that an engineering schools teaches only engineering, and a medical school teaches only medicine. So once you are out of high school you are forced to pick your major and your career. Get into an engineering school and you are pretty much shut out from being able to study psychology or chemistry or economics. For that you need to get into a school more akin to liberal arts colleges in the US. But even there you have to pick your major right in your freshman year; you can’t study both the sciences and the humanities. If you want to take chemistry you won’t be able to take philosophy. In fact the situation is so bad that in most places students cannot study even biology and mathematics together!

Needless to say, this system places a newly-minted high-school student into a draconian straitjacket where he or she has to pick a career and then stick with it for the next four years with absolutely no flexibility in changing a major or adapting one’s talents to one’s profession. It should also be obvious that this strict compartmentalization affords almost no opportunities for developing interdisciplinary research skills, a staple of today’s complex research problems. The result is predictable; an alarmingly large number of students who when they graduate from college are either unhappy with their major or incompetent at it or both.

Compounding these problems is perhaps an even bigger one; the social perception of professional education at the expense of relegating the sciences and humanities to the dustbin of mediocrity. The great demand for engineers, doctors and businessmen has placed these disciplines on a pedestal. As a result, the standards for admissions to these professional courses are much higher than those for the sciences or humanities. This typically means that spots in these professional courses are reserved for students who graduate from high school with the highest grades. Conversely, left to study the sciences and humanities are the scum of the earth, high-school graduates who are usually at the bottom of the pile. Since almost nobody from the top is going to fill out the science or humanities application, the liberal arts colleges relax their admission criteria to accommodate the most mediocre of the lot. The bottom line: engineering colleges tend to be populated with smart, articulate, ambitious students while the liberal arts colleges fill up with students who are studying sciences or the humanities pretty much because they aren’t good enough to get into any other place. No wonder that many of these state-run colleges are filled with mediocre and unhappy students who would rather be doing something else. This is unfair both to the students but more fatally to the disciplines themselves which suffer from active neglect at best and a constant assault of mediocre minds at worst.

It needs no imagination to perceive the effect of this segregation on the occasional outlier who, in spite of getting top grades in high school, consciously stays away from engineering or medicine because he actually wants to study chemistry or physics. For one thing he will have a very hard time finding intelligent, like-minded peers who can provide intellectual companionship, and we all know how influential the peer environment in college can be. In addition, the segregated system will virtually ensure that most of his peers outside his college will look down upon him; they will think that the reason he is not studying engineering is because he wasn’t good enough and more generally, the fact that he is not studying engineering means that he isn’t really worth paying attention to. In addition to the lack of research opportunities cited above and the mediocre faculty at state-run colleges combined with the poor employment outlook for scientists compared to other professionals, it is hardly surprising that many bright science students quickly leave science and get into better-paying professional fields. Now there’s a reason for the common complaint cited in the article, that Indian students are not studying the sciences anymore.

There is also a related social reason not discussed in the article which I just alluded to; the lack of societal respect for science and the humanities. Partly because of the educational segregation outlined above and partly because of a curious mentality that equates monetary success with intelligence and capability, Indian parents are loathe to encourage their kids to study anything other than professional disciplines. One theory I have about this has to do with the environment that many of these parents grew up in, that of socialist India. If you were an Indian parent who could not make money because of government constraints and if your son or daughter were growing up in a new, more market-friendly India, you certainly wouldn’t want your children to forgo the opportunities that you didn’t have. In this sense, many Indian parents who want their kids to become affluent are living the dream that they themselves couldn’t live. This is reasonable within limits, but it’s also creating a significant social bias towards all kinds of other professions including the sciences, humanities and the arts. In turn, the kids are judging other kids by the same standards that their parents have applied to them. In their worldview, any other kid who is not doing the same thing that they are doing must be unintelligent, misguided in his ambitions or both. This attitude feeds upon itself and perpetuates and has created a manifestly unhealthy peer environment. If India is to attract its best minds to science, it must create a society where science is respected for its intrinsic value at all levels, from parents to kids to teachers.

In India, B doesn’t stand for ball

One of the distinguishing features of all socialist countries and especially the old Soviet Union was the ubiquitous bureaucracy that pervaded every aspect of life. Indian bureaucracy and red tape are famous and recalcitrant, so recalcitrant that it seems that even twenty odd years of free-market reforms have been ineffective in undoing them. There has undoubtedly been much progress; for instance, getting a simple telephone line installed in your office in the 1980s could take up to a year. Other simple services could results in unacceptable delays and a trail of paperwork that would put a rainforest conservationist to shame. Setting up a small business in India was a nightmare and to some extent it still is; by one account you need 165 licenses to open a hotel in the country. But things have changed. Wireless companies have flooded the market and ensured that the Indian telephone experience is no different from anywhere else in the world, and Mumbai today probably sports a more diverse collection of cell-phone models than Los Angeles. Setting up a business is still not easy, but you don’t have to spend your entire life waiting for it.

Yet science seems to be straggled by unacceptable bureaucracy. But before we move on to its more predictable effects, we should first note its most startling aspect: the lack of a tenure system in Indian academia. For the longest time, even in top Indian institutions, there was no tenure review process and mediocre performers essentially hung around for life. Sometime in their 40s or 50s they would be bumped up from “assistant” to “associate” position by virtue of “seniority” alone. But institutions would naturally be obliged to pay their salaries and benefits even as they were producing little noteworthy research and blocking positions for younger scientists. A mandatory retirement somewhat compensated for the problem, but the effect of this accumulation of deadwood cannot be underestimated. The renewal of scientific blood and constant assessment of existing personnel is an essential condition for scientific productivity. Without tenure, not only was there no replenishment of the stock but there was a constant, general sense of malaise that spread to other faculty members and students. This factor is so obviously important that it’s not even worth elaborating on it too much. Whatever the merits and drawbacks of existing tenure systems in the West, it goes without saying that there should be some system of periodic evaluation and tenure. Thankfully some institutes like the NCBS have now instituted tenure reviews, but this is still a drop in the ocean compared to the vast majority of Indian science institutions.

Then there are the more prosaic but undoubtedly debilitating effects of bureaucracy. Senior Indian scientists cited in the Science articles remember the 60s and 70s when they had to wait months for simple chemicals and equipment and were asked to justify the details of every single purchase. State-of-the art equipment is now found at many top Indian institutions, but the justification part has largely stayed the same. Funding for Indian science may have grown, but every rupee is watched with a fervor that would evoke Big Brother. The article quotes an Indian scientist lamenting this situation and saying that he feels stifled by a system that asks him to submit a detailed report on his work every 3 months. It’s one thing to ask for detailed progress reports, it’s another to almost dictate the direction of someone’s research by scrutinizing every detail. Bureaucracy also engenders a lack of transparency, with officials conveniently hiding their responsibilities and mistakes under layers of obfuscatory paperwork. It’s pretty obvious that open science and freedom of inquiry can never thrive under such constraints.

The red tape also dissuades existing scientists from striking out in new directions; as the Indian Institute of Science’s director Prof. P. Balaram puts it in one of the Science articles, “Even the best of intentions can disappear without a trace in the quicksands of officialdom”. This is especially stifling for expatriate Indian scientists who have been exposed to a different kind of research environment for many years and are now seeking to starts their own labs back in India. Unfortunately the experiences of scientists coming back to India after a long time seem all too alike; almost any effort by these scientists to institute progressive practices and cultures ingrained during their experience abroad can be construed as elitism and an insolent effort to rock the boat. It’s pretty clear that unless bureaucracy is seen as a culture-independent, fundamental barrier to scientific progress, research aspirations will continue to disappear into the “quicksands of officialdom”.

The battle hymn of the old guard

Many of the problems riddling Indian science could be distilled down to one factor; what’s been called the Indian “scientocracy”. This may well be the hardest hurdle to surmount since it really reflects a problem endemic in Indian society as a whole. Although it has been rapidly changing in the past few years, Indian society remains hierarchical at all levels, from the family to private organizations. Traditionally society has been organized, at least implicitly, by class, caste and official titles. The caste system may have been largely shaken off, but other layers remain.

India has a very strong paternalistic streak in its many organizations and scientific organizations are no exception. Hero-worship is a rather deeply ingrained part of Indian culture, although the young generation seems to be showing some promising signs of shaking it off. Age usually commands great respect and obedience. “Senior” scientists who have done especially noteworthy work can be virtually worshipped. Some are treated akin to Gods. Students are explicitly or implicitly encouraged not to talk back to professors or ask them probing questions. I have heard too many cases of students being “shown their place” when they tried to be too inquisitive in class. In most cases even younger scientists are not addressed on a first-name basis. In the lab the PI reigns supreme and most labs are run as minor fiefdoms. Even minor decisions and ideas may have to be approved by the PI. Irreverent inquiry is almost always squished, even if it may lead to productive science. This is the case even in private companies.

All this has led to a rather conspicuous lack of open inquiry of the kind that fosters efficient scientific communication and the dispersal of ideas. Science especially is the quintessentially egalitarian system, where the only thing that should matter is how good someone’s ideas are and not how old or distinguished they are. Last year in an Op-Ed in Science, a previous director of India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (the Indian counterpart to the NSF and the NIH) bemoaned the lack of irreverence in Indian scientific culture, although he must have been aware that his generation has played an active role in perpetuating it. He gave examples of famous scientists – Feynman, Watson, Crick, Feigenbaum, Venter – whose playful irreverence and lack of automatic respect for the “elders” in their field has led to both revolutionary ideas and a strong culture of innovation. The implications are clear; an Indian Feynman would probably be silenced and perhaps even cast out of the scientific establishment for daring to question his superiors. The Indian scientocracy dissuades bold, probing questioning.

The articles in Science don’t address this aspect of Indian science which I believe is of paramount importance. One does not create a scientifically fertile environment by surrounding himself with yes-men. There are countless cases to prove the contrary; the Manhattan Project and Bell Labs being only two examples of organizations where thinking outside the box led to great advances. True breakthroughs can only arise from individuals, and especially young individuals, questioning the status quo and boldly treading the boundaries of knowledge. Indian science clearly has to catch up.

The future?

The articles in science seem to strike a note of cautious optimism. India is certainly paying much more attention to its scientific landscape than it ever did and it is clearly eager to leave its mark. Whether symbolic or real, its aspirations for a moon shot signify its ambitions. The hurdle as I see it is that the problems outlined above run very deep and their roots extend through many generations. They are not problems which can be resolved in one year or even in ten. Plus, as some scientists in the article say, the sheer magnitude of the issues is such that even with all these efforts Indian science has not reached a critical mass; a startling statistic says that the total number of biologists in India is less than the number in Boston alone. So what can be done?

It is clear that the solution will have to come from multiple fronts. Some problems are easier to address than others. The syllabus will have to be overhauled and this can be accomplished at least locally at some places by convincing the administration of the value of including modern topics. The compartmentalization problem is more entrenched since it depends on demand for professional versus scientific jobs, a situation that’s unlikely to change in the near future. But at least in some cases it could be accomplished by driving home the conceptual and commercial value of cross-dsciplinary topics like neuroscience, biophysics and biostatistics.

The centrality of science in human progress and thinking must be driven home by the media, by educated intellectuals and most importantly by the senior scientists who seem to command public attention; perhaps some of them can put the hero-worship to good use. As upholders of the scientific status quo and guardians of the purse-strings, they can do a lot. This might generally improve the standing of science in the public consciousness. It might lead more top students to study science and it may lead their parents to support their ambitions. A lot of Indian scientists have blamed lucrative IT jobs for presumably drawing away scientific talent. It is clear that a nation full of IT professionals cannot fulfill its scientific destiny and demonstrate real progress, but this situation is unlikely to change any time soon, and as they say, it’s much better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. The new scientific initiatives melding undergraduate education and research and offering thousands of scholarships to bright high-school students are certainly a step in the right direction, but the fact that these initiatives have not yet touched the preponderant state-run universities leaves much to be desired.

Ultimately the transformation will take time, probably a long time. Young Indian scientists including homegrown researchers and expatriates have to work together and implement positive changes in scientific culture, lab safety and communication. They will start anew and there is no doubt that we will have to wait perhaps twenty or fifty years to see truly significant changes. They will nonetheless face resistance from some of the old guard , but one can always remember Max Planck’s statement: “A new scientific theory does not prevail because it convinces its detractors of its validity, but rather because its detractors die and a new generation grows up on it and recognizes its value”.

Renewal can be the only true catalyst for fundamental change.

[Image Credit: By Pérot [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons]

But what really catapulted the story to public attention was the finding that resveratrol, a molecule found in red wine, might do this. The presence of a (relatively) cheap, edible substance universally consumed, savored and culturally revered that might slow down aging naturally led to unprecedented public attention. The French and Italians might say “I told you so”, but suddenly the holy grail of medical science seemed to be within reach. As usual though, the initial euphoria gradually gave way to a more cautious and tempered belief in the benefits of red wine in mitigating the ill effects of age, and indeed in the whole field of caloric restriction itself. The complete story is fascinating and too convoluted to recount here, but the simple fact of the matter is that the biology of aging is much more complex than we imagined and the initial breakthroughs have not been as unambiguous as they seemed. Not surprisingly, ascribing something as complex as aging and its attendant physiological changes to the action of a single family of genes and proteins has turned out to be simplistic at best (as a comparison, even obesity is thought to be caused by dozens of genes with overlapping effects). In addition, anti-aging effects that got the attention of the New York Times turned out to be significant only in “lower” animals and not in mammals. As it stands today, while research on caloric restriction undoubtedly has great potential, many complications need to be ironed out before the initial optimism can be justified. Curiously, much of the high-profile work in the area can be traced in various forms to a single laboratory at MIT. A recent article in Science does a great job detailing the personalities, the findings and the controversies that sprang from this and other laboratories’ work; the entire saga seems fit for a Sinclair Lewis novel.

But whatever the scientific status of the field, its high-profile nature and its potentially revolutionary implications promised ample funding for interested researchers, and over the years it has attracted both highly visible as well as lesser known scientists. One of the individuals who waded into resveratrol territory was Dipak Das of the University of Connecticut Medical School. Over the last few years Das  published several papers detailing the beneficial effects of resveratrol in possibly preventing or mitigating oxidative damage caused in cardiovascular and neurological diseases. While most of his research has been published in low-impact journals, it seems that Das was on his way to a lucrative research career involving resveratrol and its role in health and disease.

Until now. It seems that somewhere along the road, he started committing fraud on a massive scale, the likes of which haven’t been seen in some time in biomedical research. It started when an anonymous tipster tipped off the university about fabrication in some of Das’s papers. The university then launched its own probe and formed a review committee. For the past two years the committee has been working in the shadows with the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) and last week they released their findings in a 50-page document. The findings indicate wholesale fraud, manipulation of results and deliberate doctoring of critical data on a shockingly regular basis between 2002 to 2009.

Much of the fabrication centers around Western blots, a research tool that’s universally used in all aspects of biological research. The Western blot is to biology what spectroscopy is to chemistry and physics. It essentially detects the presence and identity of specific biomolecules, especially proteins. The proteins appear as dark bands on a white background with different lanes representing different proteins. Western blots are absolutely indispensable in confirming the identity of a novel or unknown protein, and I think it’s safe to say that most biomedical researchers who have won Nobel Prizes have used these tools in their research. In case of Das, the report has found dozens of Western blots to be grossly manipulated using image manipulation software.

There are two aspects of the report that bear closer scrutiny. One is the sheer number of Western blots found to have been doctored. The committee examined 26 papers and cited no less than 88 figures which appear to be manipulated (there were also several that appeared normal). This is a staggering amount of manipulation and rules out accidental oversight. Das would have to be involved in a concerted, conscious and deliberate effort to tamper with so much data. It’s quite clear that the magnitude of the manipulation alone points strongly to purposeful fraud.

The second aspect of the report concerns the great difficulty of detecting the fraud. Western blots seem to notoriously amenable to manipulation; they prominently featured in another recent high-profile case of fraud in India involving Gopal Kundu of the National Center for Cell Science (NCCS). In the report on Das’s work, single bands of proteins in Western blots have been enlarged and their borders further magnified to show the contrast between the background for that particular band and for others, indicating that the band in question was copied and pasted. Image manipulation software can sometimes produce such artifacts and some of the data appears like it could also have been the result of negligence or sloppy editing, but the number of such instances again rules out merely these possibilities. But the difficulty of discerning the doctored data also indicates more generally how difficult it can be to detect fraud in science. Even experienced specialists, let alone laymen or researchers from other fields, wouldn’t have thought to look for these minute differences which are evident only in retrospect. To demonstrate the process, at one point in the report the committee actually depicts a mock manipulation protocol where bands are edited or appended to other bands from totally different experiments. The subtleties in the data make it clear that even in the future it would be relatively easy for researchers to get away with this kind of manipulation. What these cases point to is the need for automated systems (“counter-software”, if you will) that could detect such fine anomalies in submitted Western blots or other presentations and try to separate artifacts from real red flags. In this case of course, the verdict is unanimous. At the end of the report, the committee finds unambiguous evidence of “unequivocal image manipulation, splicing, background erase and duplication” in a vast number of cases resulting in both data fabrication and falsification.

The debacle is ending in ways that such unfortunate scenarios usually end. The university has already begun proceedings to fire Das from his position. It is very likely that he will never be able to do research again, and that’s probably the way it should be given the extent of his fraud. Sadly, Das has not made things any easier by accusing university and department officials of racist prejudice. When you have to resort to such allegations in the face of massive evidence detailing your dishonesty, you only make your guilt seem more likely.

Ultimately this episode speaks as much about the culture of scientific research as it does about the transgressions of a particular researcher. We may not know for some time why Das felt like committing fraud on such a massive scale, but I suspect that the high-profile nature of anti-aging research and the funding that such research commands may have had at least something to do with it. In the last few years, resveratrol, caloric restriction and sirtuins have made it into the public discourse about science like few other topics. The possibility of harnessing all this data to solve the ultimate mystery of aging has ensured both sensationalist news items and eager funding agencies wanting to enable the next breakthrough. When you work in such high-profile fields, it is more tempting to fabricate your results to snare more funding. In this particular case, Das’s work was deemed to be low-impact and peripheral to the field and so the damage might be negligible, but in someone else’s hands it could well be extensive. The case of Jan Schon immediately comes to mind.

The other reason underlying Das’s behavior might simply have been the complexities of biology. Das has been at the university since 1984 and got tenure in 1993, so it’s curious why he decided to fabricate results in the last decade or so. I am quite ready to believe that his work on the complex effects of resveratrol on disease may have run into roadblocks, prompting him to start making up results that he wanted to see but which he didn’t. Most research these days and especially biomedical research is a complex game. In some ways we are trying to bite off more than we can chew. In such cases wishful thinking can dominate, and when expected results don’t pan out because of the complexity of the system under consideration, it becomes easier to succumb to desperation and temptation. The resveratrol story may fit into this paradigm, with initial reports suggesting a tantalizingly simple connection between the drugs and aging and more recent reports questioning this connection. Yet again, nature is not just more complex than we imagine, but it is more complex than we can imagine.

The only remedy for avoiding such debacles may be more acute vigilance, self-policing and an honest willingness to accept failures. And some modesty before nature may be in order here.

When I came to America two things struck me. First, that science popularization enjoyed vigorous participation and appreciation from both scientists and non-scientists. And second, that some of the clearest writing about science came from people without formal scientific backgrounds. There are indeed many famous science writers like Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, E O Wilson and Steven Weinberg who have impeccable scientific credentials, but there’s an equal number of others like Carl Zimmer, Robert Crease, Richard Rhodes, James Gleick, Rebecca Skloot and George Johnson who have written first-rate books on science and its history and philosophy, and whose grasp of basic science rivals that of experts in the field. With the rise of blogs and online media, science popularization has enjoyed an even bigger audience and entire conferences like ScienceOnline are organized and attended by science writers and journalists who are fundamentally science popularizers. I attended ScienceOnline 2011 this year and was very impressed by the scientific passion and drive for science communication that I saw in all the non-scientists attending the conference. Most of the attendees had basic degrees in science but very few of them were professional scientists.

In this post I want to address the troubling attitude about science popularization that existed among my fellow students in college. I already consider my college years a thing of the past, so recent college graduates should definitely voice their observations and opinions in the comments section. Have things changed?

As I noted above, the real problem with the attitude toward science popularization is that it is endemic of a more troubling larger view of science as being equivalent to research and nothing else. But this view is just plain wrong. Even a cursory glance at the history of science reveals that while research has been the primary driving force within science, the teaching of science, scientific funding, scientific collaborations and even rivalries, the impact of social factors on the direction of research and yes…science popularization, have all played a key role in science’s transformation of the modern world. This history reveals a simple fact that is sometimes forgotten; science is very much a social activity. The image of the lone scientist toiling away in his lab and making a great discovery with immediate impact on society was never really true, and is not true at all in this era of expensive science, international collaborations and interdisciplinary research. These days it’s not enough to have a great idea; one needs to sell it to academic institutions, government agencies, private corporations and other funding bodies.

But most importantly, one needs to sell it to the public. And this is true even if the sale is not actually conducted from a park bench by every individual scientist. The sale is necessary because not only has the majority of scientific research in history been funded from the public coffer but because that funding will stop flowing if the public is not convinced of the value of research. We are already seeing this happening in the US. A country which has been the largest public supporter of science until now is struggling to hold on to the public purse strings through its government agencies, in part because of a fundamentally bad economy but also because public support for basic science has been increasingly tainted by multiple factors including the declining quality of education, fundamentalist religion and a growing inability to separate long-term prosperity from short-term benefits.

The only solution to this problem is better science communication. No number of brilliant scientific research ideas by themselves are ever going to reach the public and solve the problem if they are not presented in a digestible form. In that sense, science “popularization” is really nothing but science “communication”, although the former entails fancier pitches. Hopefully the latter word conveys a much bigger and obvious sense of urgency. Thus henceforth I will refer to science popularization as science communication.

Once the key dependence of scientific support on a public that mostly is not formally scientifically educated becomes clear, the important of science communication cannot be underestimated. Communicate science, otherwise doing science will slowly but surely become an uphill battle. My friends who were erstwhile scientists should have realized that their future as science doers depends in an important way on the science communicators that they disparaged. Perhaps that should have generated more respect for the communicators.

Indeed, even within science the importance of “explanation” has been widely recognized. Scientists who were masters of explanation may not always be as well-known as the movers and shakers of science but within the community their importance is unquestioned. Most people won’t recognize the name of Harvard physicist Sidney Coleman who contributed much more to science by way of teaching, critiquing and explaining than he did through original research. Robert Oppenheimer was similar. At the height of his powers, Oppenheimer once said that the business of theoretical physicists was to explain to each other what they could not understand. Niels Bohr, a scientist who had an almost maddening obsession to state scientific facts accurately, used to stress to his brilliant students and colleagues that they could not claim to have understood the thorny subtleties of quantum mechanics if they could not explain them to each other in “plain language”. Richard Feynman quipped that one could not really hope to have understood something if he or she were unable to explain it to the average layman on the street. It may not be obvious, but all these scientists were implicitly extolling the key value in science of what we are calling science “popularization”.

But assuming that my friends had understood the importance of communication, that may have still led them to their second misunderstanding; that only scientists who are accomplished in research are capable of the best scientific communication. As I have noted before, even a factual examination tells us otherwise; there are as many first-rate formally untrained science communicators as there are trained ones. This leads right away to the larger fallacy stated above; the assumption that knowing or doing science necessarily means spending all your time in actual scientific research.

It’s important to spend some time discussing this fallacy since it also implicitly assumes that being steeped in the fundamentals, getting trained at the best universities or under the best scientists or being the valedictorian of your class are all equivalent to great scientific creativity and necessarily imply an actual research career. This is not the case at all, not just among non-scientists but even among scientists. As the case of Coleman and Oppenheimer reveals, the history of science reveals a multitude of (largely unsung) first-rate scientific “critics”, those who had an excellent grasp of their field but who could not, for one reason or other, achieve creative genius commensurate with their intellect. But Coleman and Oppenheimer were still exceptional scientists. How about science journalists who graduated with degrees in history, english and philosophy and then penned top-notch scientific volumes? The bigger point really is that science, just like many other things, is basically a set of complex ideas that can be digested by virtually anyone if they really apply their mind to it. Those who can understand the tortuous meanderings of politics or the vagaries of sports statistics really shouldn’t have much problem understanding scientific basics, and this is proven for example by the “amateurs” who have edited excellent scientific entries on Wikipedia. Most of these people lack formal scientific training and yet have a knowledge of many scientific ideas that rivals that of the best scientists. And yet are we going to cast them aside because they are not professional scientists and will not win the Nobel Prize? There’s another key point; people may sometimes realize relatively late in their career that their real talents lie in other aspects of science like teaching and communication and not research. In fact this happens all the time (and we should be honest enough to own up to it) since many of us don’t really know what we are truly good at until late in our career. Should we then just give up these other scientific activities because we are supposed to fit within only one narrow box? Would we have dissuaded Isaac Asimov (“The Great Explainer”) from writing all those wonderful science books because he was not publishing top scientific papers? Such thinking reflects a very impoverished view of the institution of science and its role in society.

The real big truth is that not only can you understand science very well without being a great scientist but that there is nothing wrong with it. Every field needs its critics, explainers, teachers and creators. As described above, science has always been a multifaceted social activity, and it is unreasonable to assume that anyone who is competent to delve into one of its many corners should also be competent enough to delve into any other.

We live in an age where more people believe in astrology and ghosts than in evolution. In this age science communication is as or even more critical than scientific research, whether this communication is done by scientists or anyone else. When you are trying to discover antibiotics against rapidly evolving bacteria or viruses and when the public which ultimately funds your research is skeptical of this very evolution, it is imperative to have good communicators on your side. None of the great ideas that are created by “real” scientists are ever going to have an impact if they are going to reach ignorant and closed minds. Nor are most scientists involved in research going to have the time necessary to communicate science on a regular basis. On the other hand, most people can grasp and appreciate scientific facts when these facts are carefully and patiently communicated by dedicated professionals.

In such cases, it’s best to leave communication to those who do it best and nurture and encourage their potential. It does not matter whether they are actual scientists or writers or just scientifically minded members of the public. Science is inherently a social phenomenon accessible to anyone with an open mind; as Oppenheimer put it, what we don’t understand we need to explain to each other. We want to get the message across. The identity of the messenger should not matter.

I had absolutely no idea then that the founder of the keyboard company was really known for things that your average keyboard designer could not possibly dream of. Ray Kurzweil- child prodigy, engineering genius and inventor of several socially significant technologies like the flatbed scanner and a machine that reads out to the blind, multimillionaire, winner of the National Medal of Technology, founder of myriad start-ups- is best known today as one of the world’s most high-profile soothsayers. In the pantheon of thinkers who think of technology as a panacea to all our troubles, Kurzweil is certainly at the forefront. In his 2005 book “The Singularity is Near” he laid out an astonishing version of the future in which mankind’s intelligence will seamlessly fuse with machine intelligence in an unprecedented, warp-speed event called the “singularity”. This would happen no later than 2029. Hearing this, it would be easy to dismiss Kurzweil out-of-hand without further thought as yet another loony new-age guru until you find out that many quite accomplished and clear-thinking individuals including Bill Gates, inventor Dean Kamen and the founders of Google take him quite seriously.

So who exactly is this Raymond Kurzweil? Filmmaker Barry Ptolemy decided to find out and the result is “Transcendent Man”, a film about Kurzweil which I watched yesterday with a mixture of fascination and disappointment. The film is playing in selected cities but the DVD and a digital download are already available on the movie’s site. Ptolemy probes into Kurzweil’s life and finds a brilliant, articulate, curious, sad, haunted man who sheds tears over his father’s grave, collects cat figurines and undergoes monthly blood tests. Along the way, several individuals who either agree or disagree with Kurzweil are interviewed. Philip Glass’s haunting, edgy score adds to the allure of this unique individual. Overall Ptolemy does a good job of bringing out Kurzweil’s essence, although the Glass score could not help but occasionally remind me that Errol Morris would have done an even better job with the film.

A child prodigy who built a music-composing computer when he was 17, Kurzweil holds dozens of award-winning patents worth millions. But beneath the success flows a silent undercurrent of emotional upheaval. Kurzweil is a man who had such a close relationship with his father and such a profoundly negative view of death that he has resolved to bring him back from the dead by recreating him from memories and memorabilia about him. He is someone who pops about 200 pills a day in the hope of staying alive at least until the day when his intelligence and personality can be downloaded into a computer so that he could discard this wretched, mortal body that we are all cursed with. And he sincerely believes that the day will arise when our only identity will be online and that using nanotechnology and AI, we will expand our intelligence to span the entire universe in a kind of grand cosmic denouement that will make the universe come alive and allow the human species to achieve immortality.

Yes, it is easy to dismiss Kurzweil as someone who has discovered an unusually liberating new controlled substance. And yet Kurzweil is not your garden variety wild-eyed rapture-seeking bearded madman. In fact, not having seen much of Kurzweil before, I was struck by how reasonable and self-assured he appears. Absent are the strenuous gesticulations, defensive maneuvers, dismissive put-downs and jargon-flinging that are the mainstay of snake-oil salesmen like Deepak Chopra. Kurzweil seems genuinely familiar with much of today’s cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, genomics and medical science and lays out his thoughts rather carefully. The problem is that the probability space of his prognostications is highly expansive and inhomogeneous. There are predictions that seem to be within the realm of possibility in a very general sense. There are those which are at least based on currently existing technology. And then there are those that are not just out there but demonstrate a decided failure on Kurzweil’s part to think things through. Unfortunately that last category dominates Kurzweil’s thinking to such a significant (and often fatally flawed) extent that while fascinated, I ended up ultimately underwhelmed with both the man and the film.

First of all, let me lay down the areas where I do agree with Kurzweil. Unlike some others I don’t think he is a “sophisticated crackpot”; it seems to be more a case of blinkered vision that’s based on some generally accepted principles. Technological innovation can indeed be exponential and unpredictable. As Kurzweil puts it, it took a very short while (and a very startled Gary Kasparov) before a computer was able to defeat a human expert at chess. The twentieth century was the epitome of amazingly rapid technological advancement and most of today’s innovations would seem like miracles for someone from 1900. The twenty-first century is very likely to witness future such miracles. Most importantly, I agree with Kurzweil that perhaps the defining technological event of this century would be the integration of the human body with electronics. This would likely start with simple but breakthrough implements that enable physically and mentally disabled people to access the world around them but would then probably lead to astonishing inventions that allow us to remotely manipulate objects through embedded electronic components. My agreement with Kurzweil also extends to breakthrough medical diagnostics enabled by nanotechnology that allow us to diagnose and treat diseases like cancer at a very easy stage. Nanoparticles are already being used for drug delivery and there is every reason to believe that disorders would be treated in the near future by injecting cell-sized nano-’robots’ that are about as intelligent in sensing and manipulating their chemical environment as you can imagine. Yes, I am on board with Kurzweil in sharing a sense of wonder at all these possibilities and I suspect that’s the main reason why so many reasonable people seem to hear him out.

So where’s the glitch? As Neil Gershenfled who knows Kurzweil and directs the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT puts it, “What Ray does consistently is to take a whole bunch of steps that everybody agrees on and take principles for extrapolating that everybody agrees on and show they lead to things that nobody agrees on,” because “they just seem crazy.”

That is indeed the gist of what’s wrong. To me Kurzweil’s thinking seems to suffer from two main…drawbacks (to put it mildly), even ignoring the fantastic nature of his predictions. First of all, he seems to regard historical precedent as virtually sacrosanct. As with many others, Kurzweil’s starting point is Moore’s Law which basically applies not just to microelectronics and transistors but also to technologies like genome sequencing and brain-mapping. I think pretty much everyone agrees that the time is not far at all when we could get our genomes sequenced for 100$ apiece. The rate of progress in mapping the activities of single neurons is also very impressive and likely to accelerate. Technology has indeed manifested itself exponentially. But that does not mean that there are no limits and that every successive stage is as facile as the previous one. Just because we have gotten through eight exponential cycles of technological expansion in thirty years does not automatically mean that the next eight cycles are going to be equally smooth. They may possibly be, but it may well be that the next four cycles are a breeze and then we get really stuck at the fifth stage. Or it may be virtually impossible to overcome the obstacles that we encounter in the third stage. A computer simulating chess is very different from a computer simulating a human brain. Given the complexities of the systems we are dealing with, it’s virtually impossible to predict the exact course of events that progress might take, no matter how rosy a picture of limitless technological adaptation the past sets up before us. Especially when it comes to our view of future technology, Kurzweil should be the first one to tell us that the past is far from a perfect guide to the future (Or as Niels Bohr put it far more succinctly, “Prediction is difficult…especially about the future”).

This brings me to the second and most important problem with Kurzweil’s predictions, which is that for all his acumen, the man seems to be almost completely unconcerned with details. You know, the things that can actually matter in developing any kind of science and engineering. This leads to him virtually ignoring all the ways in which thing can go wrong. Consider this: one of the central events in Kurzweil’s journey to the singularity will occur when we are able to reverse-engineer the human brain. Chew on that a bit. Reverse-engineering the brain entails mapping every connection, every axon, synapse and dendrite inside our remarkable 3-pound ‘thin-bone vault’. And why exactly is Kurzweil so optimistic about this astonishing development? Why, because not only are we making unprecedented progress in mapping neuron activity, but the essence of neural reverse-engineering will be based almost entirely on capturing the genome sequence that codes for the brain. There is so much wrong with this viewpoint that I will leave it to others (for instance see Derek Lowe, PZ Myers, Luysii) to demolish the argument and emphasize the complexity of the brain. I have no doubt that deciphering the genomic basis of neuronal connectivity will be a landmark discovery, but for all his engineering genius, Kurzweil seems to be woefully ignorant of the sheer complexity of biology. With this viewpoint he also affirms his membership in the group of starry-eyed optimists who are completely enamored with the “omics” revolutions. These optimists seem to equate data with meaning.

The genome is the raw material, the starting point for any kind of biological organization. If the genomics revolution has taught us anything, it’s how impoverished our knowledge of biology remains even after sequencing the genome. Most importantly, we have light years to go before we can understand the complex signaling networks that functional proteins form with each other and with genes, the subtle and fine-grained interdependencies of the components and networks with each other and the non-linear and startlingly indirect effects that perturbing these networks can have on physiological processes. Add to these layers of complication the control that epigenetic modifications exercise and you have a Dante’s version of the hell of biological complexity that goes far beyond anything the genome sequence can tell us.

And this is where Kurzweil ultimately disappoints. Anyone (and certainly an engineer) who is studying or engineering complex systems knows how much the details matter. Every bench scientist or code-writer knows how the most unexpected and annoying details can thwart the design of simple experiments. And let’s not even get started on the details of the technical, existential and ethical problems that true AI would engender. It would be one thing if Kurzweil discussed these problems and gave reasons for why he doesn’t think they matter. But it’s quite another when he steers virtually clear from and does not even allude to details and pitfalls. In the absence of recipes for identifying details and solving problems, prognostications are castles in the air, ephemeral beasts whose existence is at the mercy of hard reality. In fact, the same self-assured demeanor that impressed me before later started giving the impression of a man who has cocooned himself into his own little world of beliefs so fully that his world is impervious to doubt. Kurzweil’s faith is unwavering, criticisms just don’t seem to count.

Among his predictions are the end of aging, the distinct transfer of human intelligence into machines and the unbounded expansion of human intelligence into the entire universe. Many have relegated such dreams to the long-standing bin of human hubris. I myself am not too bothered about the part about hubris; if humans really wanted to give up their conceit and stop asserting their dominance over nature, they have long-since lost the chance. I also don’t have a problem with technological optimism and I take a rather dim view of the criticism of technology as a cure to all our woes; that’s precisely how we as a species have been developing and using technology since the discovery of fire, and as far as we do it responsibly and realistically, it’s a little hypocritical to scream foul murder now when someone proposes grand technological solutions to humanity’s most pressing problems.

No, what disturbs me most about Ray Kurzweil is that, quite apart from his blithe indifference to details and problems, it appears that in his quest to make mankind immortal, Kurzweil is somehow falling prey to the same fears that haunt him. He seems to evince a genuine distaste of death (he wouldn’t be the first one) and much of his feelings seem to be motivated by the profound feeling of loss he faced after his father’s death. He says that we lure ourselves into a false feeling of satisfaction by constructing all kinds of myths and comforting stories around death. Perhaps, by postulating mankind’s and his own immortality by 2029, Kurzweil is doing the same thing?

One of the greatest breakthroughs in twentieth century biology was the finding that RNA can serve as a catalyst and drive some of life’s essential chemical reactions. This discovery which garnered a Nobel Prize led the way to understanding ribozymes, splicing and the structure and function of the ribosome. It also propelled the conception of the so-called “RNA world hypothesis” for the origin of life which suggests that RNA was the earliest enzyme. This hypothesis in various forms has since been regarded as the single most plausible hypothesis for the origin of life.

After the sound of my parents’ voice, his voice is among the first ones I distinctly remember hearing after being born. For twenty three years as I grew up, his voice filled our home. It sustained, nourished and inspired me at every turn of my life. And while it will forever be a part of my soul, the source of those thundering notes himself has passed into history. Pandit Bhimsen Joshi is no more, and with him a part of my childhood has died. Yet his legacy will live on in the hearts of millions like me who will continue to marvel that men like him lived and gave so much to us.

Bhimsen’s voice resonated in my ears almost from the moment that I was born. Like so many other things, I owe my introduction to this remarkable man and his work to my father. Over the course of the last thirty years, my father who has been a dedicated fan gathered over four hundred live recordings of Bhimsen concerts. They constantly permeated our house at all hours of the day. They spanned over fifty years of Bhimsen’s own life and career and were gathered from multiple sources; from other die hard fans, from commercial sources and from Bhimsen’s own students. Some recordings originated with the great man himself and made their way to our collection through a long-winded trail of ardent music lovers and collectors. Over time the collection became substantial and valuable. My exposure to Bhimsen was so constant that once at the age of six or seven, I accosted him even as he was paying a visit to a travel agency whose office was located in our apartment complex. Possessing none of the timidity that comes with age, I let out a delighted cry of recognition: “Aren’t you Bhimsen Joshi? I of course recognized you right away!”. I can still see the master smiling beneficently at me.

What was so special about Bhimsen? Simply put, there is not a single other singer I know from any musical tradition whose voice shimmered with such sheer unadulterated supreme motive power. Bhimsen’s voice thundered. It leapt and bounded and bored through our hearts. It ripped apart the air between us and the source and stirred something elemental within our soul. It justified in every sense the etymology of Bhimsen’s name; a towering musical version of the mythical Bhim whose physical prowess was legendary. It constantly stretched our imagination to believe that the human throat, that compact assembly of muscles, nerves and skin could produce frequencies and notes that were so formidably potent as to almost physically make us tremble the way the wind from a tornado would. When Bhimsen sang, it was as if the heavens roared, and the Gods listened. But to call the notes emanating from him as emerging from his throat would do him a disservice. Bhimsen’s music seemed to arise from the collective movement of every single cell in his body, the Herculean labor of every electrical connection between his neurons. Yet there was extraordinary versatility; sometimes the sound seemed to emerge from the depths of an endless, cavernous labyrinth of musical complexities and powers, yet a fraction of a second later it would turn into lyrical threads of sheer silk, into ephemeral snowflakes being wafted on a delicate breeze of air. This was spirituality of the highest order, pulling us into the great unknown which only Bhimsen could parse. The result defied belief.

This belief was not sullied by any of the tales about him which had more than a shred of truth in them: his sometimes difficult relationships, his problems with alcoholism and his temperamental behavior. If anything, they served as a valuable reminder that this supremely gifted being was human after all. Similar to other great men, Bhimsen’s flaws only enhanced his prowess and reputation and generated anecdotes enthusiastically bandied about by his fans as they listened to his performances late in the night in the Sawai Gandharva music festival which he pioneered. Every one of his habits, from contorting his face to comical proportions to wildly flinging his extremities around when traversing a particularly treacherous set of notes, was affectionately remembered.

With such a prodigious command of the musical canon at his disposal, Bhimsen could mold his voice to suit any mood, any Raga and any genre of song. My earliest exposure was to his “Abhangas” which were songs dedicated to Indian saints. Bhimsen spent most of his life and career in Pune, and many of the Abhangas were subsequently dedicated to Marathi saints like Dynyaneshwar and Tukaram. My father used to play these all the time and I was so taken with them that I used to frequently do my best to sing a flimsy resemblance of them in school events. One set of memories connected with the Abhangas vividly stands out. My father originally hails from the town of Ratnagiri in the Konkan region. In those days we used to visit our Ratnagiri relatives often. The trip used to entail hot, long, precarious drives through the Western ghats. Air conditioning in cars was non-existent and the condition of the roads often meant at least an eight-hour trip with a flat tire or two generously thrown in. Defying the instructions in the Bhagavad Gita, I used to look forward to the fruits and resented the journey. But the one factor that always kept me from despairing was the presence of Bhimsen’s Abhangas which my father used to inevitably play on tape. The majestic Sahyadri mountains looming on the horizon and the green countryside sloping gently beneath us, the Abhangas used to imbibe the landscape with newfound grandeur. Sometimes it seemed that Bhimsen’s booming voice would reverberate in the mountains forever, becoming an integral part of their billion year old history, enduring into their future till eternity. Maybe it did.

Every music lover has a listing of his favorite artist’s most memorable renditions. With Bhimsen such a list is difficult to compile since the man could turn everything he touched into pure gold. Yet there inevitably are certain Ragas that stand out, ones to which only Bhimsen could do supreme justice. Considering the utter energy of his voice, what better Raga to pick than Miya-Malhar, the Raga of the Rains. The Raga could well have been crafted a thousand years ago exclusively so that Bhimsen could sing it one day and leave us awestruck. The legendary Tansen from King Akbar’s court was said to be able to summon forth the rains at will by singing this Raga. Close your eyes and listen to Bhimsen singing Miya-Malhar, and one could easily believe the legend. The initial slow vilambit cadence evokes majestic pictures of clouds gathering. Very few leading singers could hit notes as low as Bhimsen could and sustain their voice at these frequencies. Bhimsen massages the aroha and awroha (the increasing and decreasing base notes) like water droplets massaged by clouds to gather together. As the speed progresses to medium, one can almost feel the glistening raindrops gradually falling down from the heavens and striking your skin. And then it comes, the roar of his voice, like a rain God who has unleashed his benign powers on earth’s denizens. As the druta (fast) rhythm builds up to a crescendo with unbelievably swift and shimmering tanas, one can almost feel the grand symphony of thunder, lighting and water unfold, enveloping us in its all-consuming glory. If you believed in God, you could believe that his name was Malhar.

Malhar is just one of many gems. Another Bhimsen specialty is Raga Darbari which evokes a mixture of melancholy, peace and beauty, best heard at night. Bhimsen could also pay the ultimate tribute to Raga Malkauns, another night Raga which is supposed to evoke a sense of romantic love. A towering morning gem is Raga Todi. And then there’s Raga Bhairavi, the Raga of conclusion, usually sung at the end of a concert; some of Bhimsen’s best known tunes are from this Raga. A particularly memorable recording was a live recording from the 1950s in which Bhimsen sang Raga Malkauns in the famous Vitthal temple in the holy city of Pandharpur. Even today this rendition sends a shiver down my spine as it evokes a sublime sense of experiencing transcendent talent in a place where millions have worshipped, prostrated and found wisdom and inspiration. One can only imagine the unique juxtaposition created by the sacred idols and the music which undoubtedly would have swayed them had they been sentient beings.

But personally for me, the ultimate embodiment of Bhimsen is Raga Yaman-Kalyan. This is a relatively simple Raga, used in many film and folk songs. It is taught to students during the earliest stages of their musical instruction. There is a perfectly good reason for the universal presence of this set of notes. More than almost any other Raga, Raga Yaman-Kalyan imbibes you with deep feelings of happiness, peace and optimism. In my opinion there is no human being who ever lived who can do this Raga the kind of justice that Bhimsen did. When Bhimsen sings Yaman-Kalyan, you feel like all the darkness in the world has been penetrated by a glowing light which will burn bright forever. The light emerges from Bhimsen’s soul and shatters your worries and troubles. It envelops the world around you with a warm glow that seems to illuminate the truth, beauty and dignity in everything that you see, touch and hear. Bhimsen singing Yaman-Kalyan is Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount.

For a long time it was considered a travesty that the Indian Government did not award Bhimsen the Bharat Ratna. Many leading minds lobbied for the award, although any one of Bhimsen’s fans knew that his talent easily surpassed every honor that it could claim. But in 2008 the government finally redeemed itself by awarding him the Bharat Ratna. Even without the award Bhimsen’s stature would have been wholly undiminished, but the government would have had to live with itself the way the Nobel committee has had to live with itself for not awarding Gandhi the Nobel Peace prize. The Ratna was a giant step for the administration, but in a way it was a small step for a man whose contributions to music had the stamp of permanence that no medal and government have. However, the government had already tacitly acknowledged Bhimsen’s stature by giving him the opening lines of one of India’s most famous national tunes- the ubiquitously sung and performed “Mile sur mera tumhara”. Bhimsen’s face juxtaposes with those of the Himalayas, perfectly indicating the power, reach and enduring legacy of his voice.

So how can we sum up Pandit Bhimsen Joshi? How can we even begin to encapsulate such a unique concentration of abilities in one man in words? His own contemporaries fully recognized his singular talents and realized that they would not see the likes of him for a long time. Perhaps the ultimate tribute was offered by the eminent vocalist Pandit Jasaraj who quipped on Bhimsen’s eightieth birthday, “Eighty years ago, Bhimsen Joshi made a contract with the Sun God. He told the Sun, ‘Shine during the day, and let me shine at night’ “. Bhimsen did shine, at every moment of our lives and those of the future.

But personally for me, the sheer all-encompassing power of Bhimsen’s works brings a tribute offered to another supremely talented individual to mind. The natural philosopher William Whewell (who coined the word ‘scientist’) said about the monumental Principia Mathematica:

“As we read the Principia we feel as when we are in an ancient armoury where the weapons are of gigantic size; and as we look at them we marvel what manner of man he was who could use as a weapon what we can scarcely lift as a burden…”

Whewell’s quote sums up what I feel about Bhimsen Joshi. Bhimsen was the Newton of Hindustani classical vocal music.

Chemical and Engineering News (C & EN) is the science and technology masthead for the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society. A few years ago it published a special issue about science in India. Much of the debate centered on points that have been bandied about often. However I believe they did miss one key point, overlooked perhaps because it is relatively mundane but which gains significance precisely in its mundaneness. But first let’s take a look at what C & EN did say about the state of science, scientific education, and research in India:

1. Sprinting before standing: A few years ago, the eminent scientist and IISc., director Prof. P. Balaram, published a perceptive and telling editorial for the magazine Current Science. I always remember the title of that editorial: It was “Sprinting Before Standing”. What Prof. Balaram was saying was that in the Indian scientific community, there is an increasing tendency to aim for high-profile, ambitious goals without having any firm ground to first stand on. Ambition is one thing but building grandiose castles in the air is another. C & EN describes this situation by enumerating one striking feature of our science universities- the big disconnect between the state of the art instrumentation and the contrasting sordid condition of the most basic infrastructure. For example, national institutes in our country today boast of spectrometers, sequences and microscopes worth crores of rupees. Yet, one look at the labs where the students work would send the US Environmental Protection Agency scurrying to get a petition to immediately shut down every lab they can lay their hands on. Many labs, even in our prestigious national institutes, are safety officers’ nightmares and are woefully devoid of basic equipment. I remember the lab in my own college which was a cesspool of toxic waste and safety hazards. In our second year we used to perform a certain protocol called ‘phosphate removal’ which called for adding generous quantities of hydrochloric acid to a blend of compounds and heating the reaction crucible. The lack of fume hoods routinely left the lab enveloped in a thick fog of noxious vapors. The same goes for some other supposedly high profile labs. In the US, working away from a fume hood is a federal violation. In my graduate school laboratory, every undergraduate student had his or her own hood. In our college lab by contrast, there was one common hood for about sixty students, a bonafide environmental and health disaster. And note that this had nothing to do with funds; how much does it take to construct a couple of hoods? Surely the college can muster up funds for such a basic long-term investment. Anyway, as Balaram says, our problem is that we are reaching for the sun without having a solid ground to stand on. That won’t work. No amount of sophisticated instrumentation is going to lead to scientific breakthroughs if the most basic of infrastructure is not in place. Before we strive to tidy up the town, let us first clean our backyard. Let’s not aim to create rocket scientists and not have enough screwdrivers. Let’s not expect sophisticated instrumentation to make up for human creativity, creativity that can be engendered only through basic education and infrastructure. We must learn to stand, before we aspire to sprint.

2. The sad story of the post-doc: This is an excellent point. Worldwide, the efficiency and rate of research primarily depends on post-docs, already well-trained personnel who can (hopefully) churn out publications and results. In India, post-docs are such a neglected breed that the whole of our scientific productivity depends on PhD. students. This is unrealistic. PhD. students are still learning the ropes and while many of them contribute to high-quality research publications, it’s unfair and debilitating to depend solely on these young minds. The situation in the US is actually not better by heads and shoulders since post-docs are paid paltry sums relative to their training. But it’s still much better than at home, and the Indian post-doc scenario has led to almost every PhD. student from a good Indian institution flocking to the US for a post-doc. A case in point is the Nobel Prize winning organic chemist Herbert Brown, whose prize-winning papers often featured Indian names on them. Even if the postdoc then returns home, it is the US who ends up marshaling her talents and resources during her time as a post-doc. Unless we provide better facilities and incentives for post-doc, we will continue to lose our best graduate students to foreign research labs just when they are getting warmed up and ready to publish.

3. The woes of undergraduate research: In India, undergraduate research is virtually non-existent. Scientists and faculty members have their hands full with their PhD. students, and the last thing they want is an undergraduate meddling in their lab. But this attitude has fostered a complete lack of appreciation of scientific research in science undergraduates, many of whom are not motivated to begin with. It is during undergraduate education that we most need to instill a love for research in our students, but it is precisely at this level that we seem to fail them the most. In the US the picture is strikingly different. Undergraduate research is enthusiastically promoted at most universities, with students regularly doing ‘internships’ and projects in summer. One can only wonder why in spite of this exposure, very few of them go on to do PhDs. In India, undergraduate research is largely an unknown phenomenon, and unless it is vigorously encouraged, not many aspiring youngsters are going to end up in science.

*The missing point: The point which I found significantly missing in C & ENs exposition was a discussion of the lack of respect for science and the humanities- and indeed almost anything that does not involve a professional career- in our society. No matter what changes, unless people’s mindsets change, nothing will finally ever change. I personally find this to be the single most important lacuna in our lack of progress. Not just science but the humanities and arts are relegated to inferior levels. In India the traditional view which always prevailed still largely prevails. Unless your son or daughter is doing engineering/medicine/business, he or she is probably not doing anything worthwhile. I keep getting appalled by the immense peer and parental pressure that students in school and college face in India to get into the rat race and get admitted into a professional course. The lack of respect for science, the humanities, and the arts is depressing to say the least and it can eventually forestall the maturation and intellectual development of any state or civilization. Any glance at the history of modern civilization, Eastern or Western, should convince us of the importance of writers, historians, philosophers, scientists, and poets. We tout the virtues of these men and women in textbooks and yet don’t want those from our own ranks to be among them.

It’s interesting that in India parents expend much effort in teaching their protege the elements of mathematics and science in school. Yet this instruction is only the means to the end, as a conduit to a professional career and never as a career in itself. Every parent teaches his or her child about Newton, Pythagoras, and Darwin, and yet most parents don’t want their child to choose a path that would enable her to become like these people. In fact most ambitions of such kind are actively stifled or ignored at the very least. I have often wondered about the stark contrast between parents’ ambitions for their children and their admiration for Indian scientists. Organize a lecture by Jayant Narlikar or C N R Rao and you are certain to find a packed auditorium full of parents who have enthusiastically brought their child to hear about the wonders of astronomy or chemistry. But ask the parents if they would like their children to professionally study science and many would demur. For several years I was told that money was the primary reason why Indian parents don’t motivate their child to pursue a career in science. But while certainly is one of the most important driving forces, recently I have started suspecting that the reason goes deeper and taps a more emotional reservoir of uncertainty and ambition in the minds of our parents. Consider the time when these parents grew up. India had a socialist economy then. Many of our grandparents and parents could not pursue financially lucrative careers even when they wanted to. They could not start their own business without digging through layers of mind-numbing bureaucracy, and strict import laws made many consumer goods like electronic gadgets a scarce commodity. Our parents know what not being able to achieve their ambitions feels like. Naturally they don’t want their children to have the same experience and want them to experience the fruits of post-1991 economic liberalization and globalization in their full glory. They simply want their children to have what they could not. At least in some cases this ambition has an unfair side to it since it consists of parents vicariously living their life through their children, something which counselors routinely discourage parents from doing. But this also leads me to an intriguing thought; with young Indians being financially much better off than their parents, would they feel more secure and encourage their own children to pursue alternative careers in the sciences, arts and humanities? Only time will tell.

In addition to parents, peer pressure and the entire system’s constraints more or less force students to flow with the current. Every facet of the system contrives to keep students from leisurely pursuing his or her interests. Within the strict boundaries of the syllabus, the excessively deferential attitude expected towards teachers and the conformity of peers, many inevitably become core conformists. The result? A large group of ‘professionals’ who may not be doing what their heart really wants to and what they may be good at. And a nation whose intellectual development is significantly skewed.

A few of them do break out, silently endure the system for what it is and finally cast the system’s cobwebs from their mind, pursuing their own path. But that number is diminutive. These few who take bold steps see themselves more as maverick non-conformists who laugh at the system. But there exists no nourishing culture, no avuncular fraternity of teachers, parents, and peers, to draw and bind a student to alternative careers. Science, art, and the humanities are social enterprises. Without support, they wither away like other lone enterprises.

Thus the question is not one of facilities, funding, or even quotas although all these factors contribute. It’s ultimately one of respect. On an general basis, we do not respect the arts, humanities, and sciences as endeavors which can lead to distinguished careers, at least on a professional basis. Compare the general differences in attitude when someone is told that their friend’s son or daughter got admitted into a ‘famous’ college to study computer engineering, as compared to when they are told that someone enrolled to do a BA in history because of his or her specific interest. Why should some professions be considered distinguished and others trivial, when humanity as a whole needs every type of intellectual artisan? While the US does have its deep flaws, this attitude seems to be largely absent here. Even the stereotypically dumb blondes inevitably majoring in Art History are not despised. Among undergraduates, you find a wide swathe of students majoring in every possible discipline, from history and psychology to international relations and sociology. As fields of study none of these are considered inferior. The US may not be the top producer of indigenous science graduates today, but it definitely leads the world in respecting diversity of careers. I am not being an apologist for the US. After all, many excuses can be made, especially concerning large populations and money. But changing attitudes doesn’t need money, and in any case we find that in India money is emphatically not the problem. Mindsets are. We have to understand the miasma of tunnel vision that we are inevitably caught in, and make deliberate efforts to come out of it.

Unless we cast aside stereotypes and recognize the worth of a variety of fountains of knowledge, I don’t believe that India will produce a significant number of well-rounded citizens with the sense and sensibilities to make choices and contribute to the fabric of civilization. C & EN probably did not belabour this point because its editors did not look at the mundane, because it was mundane and uninteresting. But it is precisely the mundane that is the most widespread and significant, in terms of both hope and despair. The silent undercurrent that runs through Indian education will finally determine India’s performance at the highest levels. Unless there is a conscious revival of values of respect, of Nehru’s famous scientific “temper”, I don’t believe Indian scientific education can expect to progress by leaps and bounds. Half of India’s 1.1 billion are below 25. If things stay the same, it won’t be surprising if C & EN finds no reason twenty years down the line to tout the promises and virtues of a smidgeon among those half.

In “India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking”, Anand Giridharadas takes a different tack from Thomas Friedman and others who have described the now familiar call centers and globalization that have turned India into an economic powerhouse. Instead Giridharadas decides to focus on the country’s most important assets- its people and their changing attitudes towards the world, their families and themselves. Giridharadas has an unusual vantage point as an Indian who grew up in the US and who returned to his country for a fresh look (although one wonders why he now lives in Cambridge, MA). The book is primarily about how India’s new economic, political and social roles have changed Indians’ relationships with themselves and their families. The most important consequence of the “New Order” is that Indians whose role in life was traditionally defined for centuries by their birth and their caste, class and gender are now seeking to make their own place in society rather than to “know” it. This is a great thing for a country where identity was defined for hundreds of years by where you came from rather than where you wished to go. As Giridharadas describes, in the new India someone from the lower caste can finally dare to dream beyond what was regarded as his indelible destiny.

To showcase these changing Indian identities, Giridharadas presents us with several “case studies” and describes the life stories of people drawn from a wide slice of Indian society. There’s the poor boy in a small village who was born into a lower caste and decides to remake his identity by pioneering English language and “personality development” classes in his village and organizing a personality pageant. There’s the “rat-catcher” whose job is to kill dozens of rats everyday in the slums of Mumbai. Then there’s the Maoist, a member of the divisive Communist insurgency in India, who resents India’s rise to wealth and fame but who has a complex relationship with the country he criticizes. The Maoist interestingly sees parallels between the old caste system and the new globalized order, with labor specialization replacing the role of labor-based caste.And in stark contrast, there’s the Ambani family, India’s richest business family whose clout extends over the entire Indian economic and political landscape. Giridharadas especially has an insightful portrait of Mukesh Ambani, one of the two Ambani brothers and one of the world’s richest men whose empire stretches from petrochemicals to biotechnology. Giridharadas stresses how the Ambanis rose to prominence by cultivating relationships, a strategy that has helped them bribe slothful bureaucrats and journalists in creative ways that include paying for their children’s education in Ivy League universities in the US. In an India where bribery is hardly an exception to the rule, the Ambanis’ behavior is nothing novel. But one of the signs of a changing India is that while old-timers look with disgust upon the culture of bribery and corruption that the Ambanis have perpetuated, many young people see them as heroes who are cutting India’s Gordian knot to an entrenched bureaucracy and socialist ethic and who are inspiring young Indians to dream big.

Further on, it is in describing the changing nature of the Indian family and relationships within it that Giridharadas really excels. Perhaps the two biggest changes in the Indian family during the last few decades have been the declining influence of parents on their children’s lives and the empowerment of Indian women in middle-class families. This has led to new challenges and opportunities in the traditional Indian conception of marriage. Women are now regarded as men’s equals in marriages and men are no longer supposed to be the sole bread-winners on whom their spouses precariously depend. Changing social mores have also awarded women an independence that was inconceivable for the older generation. Young men and women are now much more comfortable with casual sex and relationships. Indian women are now free to choose who they may or may not marry, or so it may seem. Yet as Giridharadas adeptly demonstrates, reality is more complex. Indian women and even men are still grappling with reconciling the modern with the orthodox. This has led to many of them living strange double lives where they have a wild time outside their homes but can instantly transform themselves into meek and dutiful sons and daughters in the presence of their parents. Ties to parents and family traditions are still too strong for many of India’s young people to assert total independence. Thus an Indian woman who otherwise has a boyfriend and dictates the terms of her own life may still end up marrying a boy picked by her parents and sacrificing her freedom. The line between old and new is still not blurry enough for the young to casually transgress it, and it would be interesting to see how the changing dynamic between young people and traditions is played out in 21st century India.

Along with newfound independence come newfound problems. As young people are increasingly defying their parents and marrying for love, they are also increasingly become more intolerant of compromises and sacrifices. This has led to a spiraling divorce rate among young Indian families even as the taboos surrounding the word divorce have been as hard to abolish as that surrounding premarital sex. Giridharadas has a perceptive account of sitting in in an Indian court and watching divorce proceedings. Interestingly, contrary to popular belief, Indian divorces are no longer limited to the wealthy class and Giridharadas watches as a wide economic cross section of husbands and wives airs its woes in court. The reasons why these people are seeking divorce are varied and range from the unsurprising (marital infidelity, plain boredom) to the revealing (the husband becomes jealous when his wife starts making more money and living a more affluent lifestyle). Divorce in India promises to challenge traditional male-female hierarchies in marriage and social customs as acutely as any other modern liberating tendency.

As insightful as Giridharadas’s book is, I have some minor complaints. Firstly, he says nothing about the negative repercussions of lowering standards in the educational system to accommodate the previously underprivileged. Liberation from the shackles of caste has been a wonderful thing for India, but on the flip side it has led politicians with vested interests to lower the standards of public education rather than to raise the standards of the lower castes through improvements in primary education. This helps no one, least of all the people who deserve better, and is engendering divisive sentiments which the author does not discuss. Secondly, while Giridharadas eloquently describes changing perceptions of caste and class, he says almost nothing about how the changing dynamic has impacted religion and religious relationships which have always been a key part of the Indian identity. Thirdly, while he makes sincere attempts to be objective, Giridharadas cannot completely escape the biases of an Indian who did not grow up in India and who is coming back after a long time to inspect his former country much as an anthropologist would inspect a tribe. On one hand this has led him to offer us some fresh, out of the box perspectives, but on the other hand it has led him to quickly generalize from his own limited experiences. Indian is a complex and vast country, and even an observation that might apply to seventy percent of its citizens would still exclude a very significant portion of the population. Thus Giridharadas’s observations should always be accepted as containing a significant element of truth but not the whole truth. Lastly, I found Giridharadas to be slightly verbose and rambling. Sometimes he seems to be too much in love with his words and phrases and belabors a point in too many different ways. This would have been fine for a work of fiction but it can tend to bore the reader and obscure clarity in a work of non-fiction.

Notwithstanding these minor gripes, I would strongly recommend the book. In a stream of books that have told us about India’s economic and political rise, Giridharadas makes a valuable and rare contribution by focusing on the most important aspect of any country- its people and their changing relationships with themselves, their nation and the world.

But rote is not exclusively an Indian invention. It was also a staple of European education in the twentieth century. Einstein recalls how he retreated into Kant and Darwin as a refuge from the deluge of rote that he had to face in the Gymnasium. In his biography of Linus Pauling, the English biochemist Max Perutz also describes having to memorize thousand-page chemistry books in his native Vienna; as he dryly remarks, such exercises gave him the kind of satisfaction one might get from walking between the two ends of Cambridge, but nothing more (Pauling’s highly influential book which provided a rational basis for hundreds of disparate chemical facts was his salvation).

However, rote memorization serves a certain valuable purpose which I want to describe here. This purpose is best exemplified by a rather remarkable story passed down by my father about the Indian mathematician and ‘Senior Wrangler’ R. P. Paranjpe, who was the principal of Fergusson College in Poona at the turn of the century. The story comes from an old mathematics teacher of my father’s, Prof. Godbole, an extremely wise and learned individual whose students went on to teach at leading Indian universities and technical colleges. He once wrote a letter to R. P. Paranjpe asking for advice on how best to do mathematics.

First, a brief digression. The title “Wrangler” was and to some extent still is an esteemed honorific that one can acquire in the highly regarded mathematics Tripos examinations at Cambridge University. Successful negotiation of the Tripos secured the title of Wrangler for those who dared and was a hallowed tradition that separated the boys from the men. As Robert Kanigel describes in his wonderful biography of Ramanujan, scholars at Cambridge in the nineteenth century could roughly be divided among those who had navigated the currents of the Tripos and those who had not. The Tripos guaranteed one a place among the Cambridge elite and brought great intellectual and social benefits. Some of the greatest scientists in the world including Lord Kelvin, James Clerk Maxwell and James Jeans made their names by cracking the Tripos. The highest rank was ‘Senior Wrangler’ with lower ones designated ‘Second Wrangler, ‘Third Wrangler’ and so on. For the very best students, anything lower than Senior Wrangler was tantamount to ignominy. The passing rate was notoriously low.

India can boast of a select few personalities who distinguished themselves through this difficult examination. R. P. Paranjpe was the first Indian to become a Senior Wrangler and enjoyed great prestige among Indian intellectuals . He was initially a professor and principal in Fergusson College and later held vice-chancellorship positions in Bombay and Lucknow universities.

As a student, my father’s teacher Prof. Godbole was curious about how best to go about studying mathematics and decided to write a letter to the great man asking for his advice. Paranjpe wrote back and suggested some tricks, habits and techniques for gaining mathematical facility. But one thing in the letter stood out for Prof. Godbole- Paranjpe’s telling emphasis on rote memorization, the same rote memorization that we look down upon. Why did Paranjpe hold this depressing habit in such high regard? To illustrate his point he told Godbole a story

It was 1899, and Paranjpe had gone to Cambridge to take the infamous Tripos. To his delight he got the highest grade and secured the coveted title of Senior Wrangler. But it was when he found out about the Wranglers in the previous few years that his pulse began to race and he indisputably trembled. Just a year before, the title of Third Wrangler had gone to none other than G H Hardy, best known as Ramanujan’s mentor, and undoubtedly one of the greatest pure mathematicians of the century. Gifted as he was, Paranjpe knew that he was no match for Hardy’s formidable intellect. What on earth could have made him outclass Hardy in the Tripos?

The decisive factor may have been rote, as Paranjpe himself said in his letter. The Tripos examination is designed so that one needs to tackle and solve as many problems as possible in a given amount of time. While creative solutions are applauded, efficiency is more important than raw genius. Hardy, that doyen among mathematicians, decided to apply his mind and come up with novel solutions to the problems. When he could not remember certain equations or formulae, he derived them in unexpected and brilliant ways. But all this took time. On the other hand, Paranjpe who was steeped in the Indian system instantly remembered equations and formulae. He had memorized them and in fact entire problems beforehand through practice. Whenever he saw problems similar to ones which he had seen before, he recalled the necessary techniques and solved the problem in a flash. Through sheer memory and the benefit of rote, Paranjpe managed to solve many more problems than Hardy, even if Hardy had shown creative brilliance in solving them.

This story is revealing but it’s probably not as startling as it sounds. While rote learning in the Indian system has rightly received a lot of flak, the criticism has also veered off to the other extreme and dismissed rote as having absolutely no value. There is a sense that ‘truly’ intelligent students don’t bother with rote. Such an attitude has also led to a perception of rote learning being completely divorced from creative problem-solving. But both these attitudes seem to be misguided. As Paranajpe’s story demonstrates, rote can undoubtedly be helpful even for navigating some of the most difficult exams in the world. And although I cannot attest to this, I suspect that a similar situation exists even with those most highly regarded exams- the Mathematics Olympiads.

What about our own notoriously difficult IIT entrance exams? Well, for one thing I remember many of my friends from the IITs stressing the importance of rote in their examinations. Rote learning certainly seems to be extensively utilized even by students in our top universities. But also consider this. One of my father’s friends is a mathematics professor at one of the IITs and for many years has been involved in formulating problems for the entrance exam. My father once asked him how he managed to come up with novel problems every single year. The friend honestly responded by saying that no, it’s just not possible to come up with entirely novel problems every single year and so even the exam committee is relegated to constructing variations of old problems from previous years. If that’s the case, is it any surprise that students who intensively train for the IIT entrance exam for an entire year often have little trouble in cracking it?

In reality, you don’t need to either love or hate rote learning to recognize its specific value; it’s just one more tool that students can use to master complicated concepts. Plus we are all supposed to leverage our strengths, and why shouldn’t someone with a good memory not take advantage of this tool? On the other hand, someone without a good memory could also use rote to get the extra mile out of his other abilities. Unfortunately in India, rote is too intimately tied to the examination system and this has resulted in reasonable criticism of rote also leading to its unwarranted wholesale condemnation.

It’s important to realize that rote learning goes far beyond exams. In its simplest incarnation, it establishes certain signposts in our brain which the brain can then quickly reference for pointing the way towards a solution. These days it’s fashionable to Google every single fact in the universe. This habit seems to have conveniently freed us from actually remembering things and is often lauded. But I think such an attitude carries a liability in not making it possible for the brain to connect ready-made facts and figures in order to tackle a complex problem. To me there seems to be a clear advantage in being able to have important numbers, concepts and definitions ready for disposal. Much of problem solving, especially in this interdisciplinary age, consists of forming links between seemingly disconnected facts and acquiring new insight from these connections. To me it seems indisputable that someone who already has all the facts in his or her head would find it much easier to make these unexpected connections compared to someone who has to look them up one by one. In the parlance of modern science, one could say that a collection of already available facts possesses emergent properties that are not inherent in the piecemeal acquisition of these details.

So before we consign rote to the dustbin, let’s not forget its benefits especially for this age of multidisciplinary research. Mindless rote learning certainly needs to be criticized, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Perhaps a final story would illustrate the advantage of having all the facts in your head. The story involves one of the greatest scientists in modern history and tells us that even great scientists efficiently use rote memorization, and sometimes unconsciously so. During the Manhattan Project, engineers working on the plutonium production reactors used to often run into problems involving quantities which had not been measured until then; these mostly involved nuclear cross sections which indicate the probability of interaction of radioactive elements with neutrons. In frustration they approached the infallible Enrico Fermi. Fermi used to complain that he could not help them since the relevant numbers were not available. But the engineers would just smile and start reading out a list of numbers to him. When the correct number showed up, Fermi’s eyes would literally twinkle and the engineers used to know the ballpark estimates. Fermi’s eyes twinkled because he had a list of other relevant numbers in his head, and his brain could connect these numbers in different ways to arrive at a good estimate of the missing quantity. Now while that does not mean that Fermi actually sat down after dinner and memorized the list, it also does not mean that having the list ready in his head by rote memorization wouldn’t have helped.

What would the world have done if the great Enrico had said, “Hold on, let me Google these”? There’s a lesson there somewhere.

Rao has now written an autobiography in which he catalogs his life and times in chemistry. It’s worth reading, especially if you want to get a glimpse of science in a developing country and the kind of efforts it takes to do research in such a place.

Rao grew up in post-independence India where the fledgling republic was striving to get its feet off the ground. India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was probably the most scientifically literate and ambitious of all the country’s leaders and placed a premium on scientific and technological development. It was under his leadership that the Indian Institutes of Technology and many of the leading national laboratories were established. Rao grew up in the 1940s and did his undergraduate work at the Banaras Hindu University in the holy city of Banaras, situated along the banks of the Ganges River. As a 19-year old undergraduate he published his first paper in Science on electrical discharges. After graduation he applied to Linus Pauling for his PhD. However, Pauling was then vigorously engaged in deciphering the structure of proteins and was not involved with the kind of experimental physical chemistry that Rao was interested in. He referred Rao instead to John Livingston at Purdue University, who was a leader in electron diffraction.

After finishing his PhD at Purdue, Rao went to Berkeley for a postdoc where he was engrossed by the likes of Glenn Seaborg, Melvin Calvin and others who had made Berkeley a Mecca for chemistry and physics. His scientific output was already outstanding- about 30 papers in leading journals- and it would have been easy for him to get a top faculty position in the US. However, Rao wanted to return to India and got a faculty appointment at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). He also got married to a woman (Indu) who has been a great source of strength and wisdom for him since then. Apart from a productive stint at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Rao has spent his entire career at IISc and then at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advances Scientific Research (JNCASR) which he founded.

The next part of the book is the part that’s most interesting. By that point (late 50s), chemistry had been revolutionized by two great developments. One was the invention of key instrumental techniques like NMR spectroscopy and x-ray diffraction. The other development was the formulation of a theoretical framework for chemistry through quantum mechanics, pioneered by Pauling, Slater, Mulliken etc. These developments were virtually unknown in India and were almost non-existent in the university curriculum. Along with a small band of other chemists, Rao was instrumental in establishing these modern chemical concepts in India. He did this, firstly by being one of the first to teach courses in quantum chemistry, spectroscopy etc. and secondly by founding a vigorous program of modern chemical research. He was certainly one of the few pioneers of modern chemistry in post-independence India; one is reminded of the American school of modern physics which Robert Oppenheimer founded at Berkeley in the 30s. Rao’s perseverance in overcoming fundamental odds like the lack of equipment and the Indian bureaucracy is noteworthy. Rao also made solid-state chemistry respectable when work in that discipline was far from fashionable. His descriptions of the threadbare capabilities of Indian science and the efforts necessary to overcome these are intriguing and inspiring. It definitely took a lot of courage and was an enormous gamble for Rao to decide to establish his career in India during that time, especially when his career would certainly have flourished anywhere in Europe or the US. But it ultimately paid off and allowed Rao to make contributions that were far greater in terms of social and national impact compared to the contributions he would have been able to make elsewhere.

So how does one do high-quality research in a resources and cash-strapped developing country? Rao’s approach is worth noting. He knew that the accuracy of measurements he could do with the relatively primitive equipment in India could never compete with sophisticated measurements in Europe or the US. So instead of aiming for accuracy, Rao aimed at interesting problems. He would pick a novel problem or system where even crude measurements would reveal something new. Others may then perform more accurate measurements on the system, but his work would stand as the pioneering work in the area. This approach is worth emulating and should be especially emphasized by young scientists starting out in their careers: be problem-oriented rather than technique-oriented. Another key lesson from Rao’s life is to not work in crowded fields; Rao would often contribute the initial important observations in the field and then move on while it was taken over by other scientists. This also keeps one from getting bored. Embodying this philosophy allowed Rao to work in a vast number of areas. He started with spectroscopic investigations of liquids, moved to inorganic materials and further worked extensively on organic materials. Among other things, he has made significant contributions to unraveling the structures and properties of transition metal oxides, ceramic superconductors and materials displaying giant magneto-resistance. All these had special physical and chemical properties which were directly a result of their unique structures. Rao co-authored an internationally recognized book- “New Directions in Solid-State and Structural Chemistry”- which encapsulates the entire field.

However, sometimes not having the right technique can prove significantly debilitating. In the 80s, the world of science was shaken by the discovery of ‘high-temperature’ superconductivity in a ceramic material. In fact Rao had synthesized the exact same material – an oxide of copper, lanthanum and barium – more than fifteen years before. However, the compound became superconducting at 30 degrees Kelvin and could be studied only in liquid helium. Unfortunately Rao was unable to do measurements at this temperature because the only relevant material available in his laboratory was liquid nitrogen, which boils at 77 K. If liquid helium had been available, Rao might well have been the first person to observe superconductivity in this material. In 1987, two scientists at IBM who discovered the phenomenon were awarded the Nobel Prize.

The later parts of the book deal with Rao’s experiences as a top government advisor and his relationships with several leading scientists including Nobel laureates like Nevill Mott and Philip Anderson. He also laments the current state of science education in India where most bright students prefer to study financially lucrative disciplines like information technology, business and medicine. The Indian middle class is still stuck in a peculiar frame of mind in which intelligence and achievement is necessarily measured by the amount of money you make. Understandably, many Indian middle class parents who themselves grew up in relative poverty want their children to be financially successful. But as Rao says, this attitude is adversely affecting the scientific future of the country and is siphoning off talent from science and technology research. For now, about the only solution to this problem is the infusion of funds in science education and research with a view to making these fields financially sustainable. Some steps in this direction have been taken with the establishment of the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER), but much more needs to be done. Unfortunately, Rao has relatively few thoughts on practical policies which could bring about such a change. This is probably the most disappointing part of the book since Rao, with his enormous experience in Indian science and government, enjoys a unique vantage point and would have been the idea guide to offer solutions and policy recommendations. But apart from stressing the importance of science education and science, he has few deep thoughts on the problem.

The book ends with some interesting appendices and reflections. One is a “Letter to a Young Chemist” in which Rao succinctly catalogs the excitement of solid-state and materials chemistry. Another essay on science and spirituality is again disappointing; while Rao clearly sees no conflict between the two, the essay is only two pages long and superficial. The last essay titled “Science as a Way of Life” is a masterful exposition on the kind of attitude one needs to be a scientist, and the role of science in our society. Here Rao teaches by example. As attested by his colleagues and friends, he has been completely dedicated to science throughout his life and demands the same kind of unflinching commitment from his students and co-workers. He still spends almost every free minute in the lab and intends to follow the example of some of his scientific heroes in working till the last day of his life. While this intensity has often made him a demanding teacher and taskmaster, no one can accuse him of not walking the talk. Rao talks about the international community of scientists and how it has helped him. He also talks about prejudices still standing in the way of international cooperation, including the occasional racism he encountered at Purdue in the 50s, which can be rapidly dissolved by the bonds of scientific kinship.

The great thing about science is that like music and art it is truly without boundaries and constitutes an international community. As Rao himself has demonstrated, excellence in science does not ask for one’s nationality, religion, gender, sexual inclination or political views. All it asks for are an open mind, healthy skepticism, honest dedication and respect for knowledge and inquiry. As Rao’s life exemplifies, cultivating these qualities can lead to a life that is extraordinarily rewarding and enriching.

Link: An extended video interview of Rao on the Vega Science Trust website conducted by his friend, chemist Anthony Cheetham of UCSB and Cambridge. The interview is worth watching and covers Rao’s life, science, public service and home life.