CorporateCutting across edges
Business Standard / New Delhi October 09, 2009, 0:10 IST
India’s education system organises disciplines into separate, rigidly isolated silos: physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, etc. It is unthinkable for a physics student in, say, Baroda University to delve into the structures of biological material. That is obviously the domain of biologists. However, cutting-edge research often needs to draw upon several disciplines and the formal distinctions are blurred in the best labs, as they are in real life. The necessity for cross-disciplinary work is exemplified in this year’s Nobel awards. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a physics graduate from Baroda, is part of a trio that now shares the Nobel Prize in chemistry. The same work could well have been awarded the medicine Nobel instead. The medicine award, as it happens, went to investigations of the properties of telomerase, the enzyme which allows cells to reproduce without ageing. That research could easily have won the chemistry prize.
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Between them, Dr Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath decoded the atomic structure of ribosomes. These are the molecular strands that translate the genetic coding of cells into proteins like haemoglobin and insulin. Proteins perform and regulate the various actions that are together broadly defined as life. Without ribosomes, and without the messenger RNA that carries genetic instructions, the DNA would just be a pretty double-helix; it would not be a working blueprint of life. An understanding of ribosomes and how they work is critical to drug research. Antibiotics, for instance, work by blocking ribosome action in bacteria. The trio used the tools and techniques of X-ray crystallography (some of which they pioneered for their special needs). Their instrumentation was directly derived from breakthroughs in digital imaging and optic fibre technology, which have won this year’s physics Nobel.
The cross-disciplinary nature of these awards is stunning. So is the fact that all three awards were for discoveries that directly improve the understanding of life processes. Together, they promise to increase life-span and improve health for populations at large. Obviously it is a matter of pride that an Indian scientist was part of this process. The Nobel will, in some quarters, be viewed as validation of an educational system that churns out so many scientists and engineers. It should, however, be seen as an alarm signal. Like three earlier science laureates of Indian origin, C.V. Raman, Hargobind Khurana and S. Chandrasekhar, Dr Ramakrishnan was compelled to go overseas to fulfil his potential. India does not possess labs to rival the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where he made his key discoveries. India does possess the know-how and the physical resources required to create such facilities. It also has the skilled manpower – trained here and sitting in various institutions abroad. So, amidst the understandable euphoria, some awkward questions must be asked. Is it impossible to create cross-disciplinary institutions that can reduce or reverse the brain drain? That requires a re-examination of the pigeonholing of disciplines into neatly separated silos.