Augmenting the PhD Programme

Professor Santanu Chaudhury

Director's Column

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While introducing the new 4 year undergraduate degree programmes proposed by UGC as implementation of NEP, it is indicated that students completing the four year programme can directly join the PhD programme. This implies that the requirement of MSc/MA degree for PhD in regular subject streams will disappear. Also output of 4year B.Tech/BE programmes are eligible for PhD admissions.

Given this context, we need to think how can we augment the present PhD programme to respond to the changing scenario. Following diagram shows four key aspects of running a Ph.D programme by an academic institution. We need to take a fresh look at these boxes.

Figure 1. The four components of doctoral programmes, with examples of the constituents of the components.( source - doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001068.g001)

Different parameters of the models need closer look to make PhD programmes more effective and impactful. I am addressing some of these issues here from my personal perspective:

• How to develop needed expertise of the faculty to supervise? We need tools to develop needed expertise of new supervisors in supervision. This is essential for ensuring mutual satisfaction between the researcher and supervisor in the PhD process. We need to explicitly specify expectations regarding PhD researcher and supervisor responsibilities from the start of the program. This may include (a)expectation of PhD learning tasks (different from previous course-based learning outcomes), (b)expected PhD timelines and formal benchmarks; (c)supervisory time allocation (number of hours) recognized in workload. We need to develop the perception that supervision is a collective responsibility of the academic units besides the named supervisor. All relationships and structures involving individuals, resources, and institutions beyond the PhD researcher, can directly or indirectly impact progress and completion of the PhD.
• Institutional policy and regulation framework should enable time bound completion of PhD work. Careful recruitment of Ph.D candidates who would complete, and attend to satisfaction during the fixed time period of the program enhances the growth and prestige of the Ph.D program. We need to increase rigor in assessing applicants for their preparedness. Admission tests should be based on tasks that are similar to the actual work carried out by doctoral researchers and not undergraduate grades.
• Human and infrastructure resources (access and awareness): access to equipment, work space, and library resources help in satisfaction of doctoral candidates. Institutional processes must facilitate access and knowledge about the research facilities. This is particularly important when we may require the researchers to pursue the programme online with limited campus immersions.
• Another very important requirement for PhD programme is provision for career guidance services. Career of a PhD candidate can take different trajectories based upon his/her area of research. This requires specialized career guidance from people in different but related professions. This service is missing in many institutions.
• In a technology institution, it is very important that PhD candidates are exposed to different aspects of the innovation ecosystem. Knowledge about patents, intellectual property rights, patentability/intellectual property protection, technology transfer to industry and possible facility for translational work based upon their research output can enhance the outcome and impact of the PhD programme of the institute
• It is extremely important to setup dedicated facility for ensuring mental wellbeing for PhD candidates. PhD can become stressful at times – institutional and community support services for PhD are very important

We also need to touch upon the nature of expected course work for the Ph.D candidates. Output of four-year undergraduate programmes need to go through rigorous course work as preparation for embarking on specialized PhD work. However, we should also consider and introduce specialized experiential training processes which can inspire and nurture big thinking and creative problem solving. Students need to learn to dissect scientific literature, to think critically, to apply rigour to their design and conduct of experiments; view their work through the lens of social responsibility; and to be able to communicate better. PhD candidates also need exposure to different aspects of scientific processes like pitfalls, blunders, including serendipitous discoveries. A wellplanned interdisciplinary discussion series can address these issues and can encourage broad and critical thinking about science and technology.

As we are moving towards recruiting most of the PhD candidates on completion of 4-year programme at a younger age, issues raised, I feel, may not be new but important for ensuring smooth graduation of PhD inputs to matured researchers with excitement and satisfaction in life.

Editorial

Kshema Prakash

Editorial

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Quoting Charles Darwin, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change”, the world has, in letter and spirit, adopted it and has been adapting to every change that humankind has ever faced. As India emerges victorious in its battle against the COVID-19 pandemic with 189 crores of total vaccinations administered to date, it only purports the 2022 theme for National Science Day, “Integrated Approach in Science and Technology for Sustainable Future”. It is, indeed, the efforts of our scientists and medical professionals that have led us to fight the pandemic and immunize our population, and now steadily marching ahead armed with COVID-19 vaccines for children.

Keeping in line with the theme of the National Science Day, this issue of TechScape commemorates the day, observed each year on 28 February in the fond memory of C. V. Raman. With the idea of introducing the younger generation to the rich scientific history of India and offering a peek into the future of SciTech, IIT Jodhpur celebrated the 2022 National Science Day with interesting talks delivered by some accomplished Indian scientists. This issue, along with regular articles, brings to you, a bouquet of transcripts of these invited talks. While Prof. Chidambaram talks about the journey of science From Raman Effect to the Nuclear Power, Prof. Brahmachari traces the Post-Independent India’s Scientific Journey as a player himself and also as a spectator. Prof. Partha Majumder’s talk enthuses the reader into the nuances of the development of Indian Statistical Institute and human diversity studies through genome sequencing. Where Prof. Ashutosh Sharma’s talk invites the reader to take a peek into A Brief History of Future: India’s Journey in S&T, Mr. Pranay Lal, the well-known writer and biochemist takes the readers through the world of viruses and microbes and how they shape our world. The News & Views section also features a report on the 3rd International Conference on Rural Technology Development and Delivery (RTDD) organized by IIT Jodhpur during March 4-6, 2022.

The In Focus section of the issue features Prof. Chhanda Chakraborty’s article that explains the deep impact that the Technologically Modified Information i.e., the deluge of misinformation leaves on us, like the Corona Infodemic. Kunwar Aditya explains his work in the article in the Innovation Gallery, about extending the flight range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) using autonomous charging techniques based on resonant inductive wireless power transfer principle. Lavanya Arora’s tryst with bacteria and the case of rising antimicrobial resistance features in the News & Views section. The Research Snippets section brings to you articles on Math Lab by Vivek Vijay et al., multicomponent reactions in organic synthesis pursuits by Rohan Erande et al, hardware accelerators for deep learning-based healthcare applications by Binod Kumar and J. N. Tripathi, high performance strain sensors for vehicle health monitoring by ShrutiDhara Sarma, electron magnetic circular dichroism in transmission electron microscopy by D. S. Negi, and game-based learning for basic electronics by Rajlaxmi Chouhan. While Deepak Saxena discusses the relationship between process changes and communication; Dipanjan Roy, in his article, proposes a unifying theme of predictive coding for healthy ageing.

We hope you enjoy the reads along with the beautiful glimpses of our campus in Bioscope section. While we attempt to make the journal a valuable source of information dissemination in the fields of science, technology and education, particularly, that carried out at IIT Jodhpur, we are immensely grateful to the authors and the readers, for keeping our motivation nourished!

Bacteria and the case of rising antimicrobial resistance

Lavanya Arora

News & Views

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It’s the year 2012. I am in my second year of Bachelor’s degree in CBM (Chemistry, Botany, Microbiology) at the JC Road campus of Jain (deemed-to-be) University, Bangalore. The college building is a seven-floor sleek tower, and our class is being held in one of the cuboid classrooms on the fifth floor. I am late for the morning class yet again, so let’s call it a routine rather than an anomaly. Thankfully, the professor, Dr Vijayalakshmi Pradeep, lets me in. As I settle down, in our class of twenty-something twenty somethings, she finishes taking our attendance and gets up. She walks between two rows of seats, and after reaching the middle, declares, “Today, my dear delinquents, we are going to learn about antibiotics.”

She goes on to narrate a story about the accidental discovery of the first antibiotic, penicillin, by Alexander Fleming, and the subsequent gold rush in antibiotic discovery that followed in the next few decades, which produced most of the antibiotics we still use. During the lecture, in her almost spellbinding narrative style, she also highlights the ease with which many people walk up to a pharmacist and demand antibiotics at the slightest sight of discomfort, as if buying candies for their children. The dialogue she used in order to point at the everydayness of this antibiotic misuse, “Cheta, one strip Amox kodi!” referring to people asking pharmacists for a strip of amoxicillin, still seems fresh in my mind, as if the class happened just yesterday. This is perhaps because I have heard different renditions of the line in many pharmacies, across different cities, each of which reminds me of that dialogue. Even within the IITJ campus, when a student visits the Institute’s primary health centre with any sort of infection, be it bacterial or viral, they are mostly prescribed with a broad-range antibiotic course for 5-7 days.

Fast forward ten years, we are living in an era reminiscent of the early 1900s, with fascist governments ruling several countries, different wars taking place in the name of peace, and a pandemic still very much omnipresent yet being ignored by many. Some have even started calling it the post-COVID era, while newer variants of the virus are still being discovered, and a fresh spike in cases in several countries has marked the arrival of another wave of remorse. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these last two years have seen a drastic increase in the use - and misuse - of antibiotics, and consequently, the rise of antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacteria - which was already a global threat before the pandemic struck.

In the early days of the pandemic itself, several scientists raised their concerns about a potential rise in the cases of antibiotic resistance during the pandemic, if proper measures weren’t taken to ensure their controlled use. They also warned us about the potential triple threat of COVID-19, bacterial co-infections, and antibiotic resistance [1, 2] and suggested several steps for proper antibiotic stewardship in order to curb the spread of antibiotic resistance. [3]

Certainly, as the months progressed, case studies of outbreaks of bacterial co-infections from hospitals around the world started getting reported. A meta-analysis of 38 such reports concluded that out of the total 1959 bacterial isolates in those outbreaks, 29% were antibiotic resistant. Among these resistant organisms, the most prevalent ones were: methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumanii, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (all four belonging to the notorious hospital-associated group of ESKAPE pathogens), and multiple-drug resistant Candida auris. [4]

According to a study in the journal PLOS Medicine [5], India alone saw an excess sale of 216 million doses of antibiotics within the first peak of COVID infections in the country, that is, between June and September 2020. It was not only antimicrobials that were used more than necessarily but also biocidal agents like surface sanitizers and antiseptic agents. Several concerns regarding the effect of these biocides on antimicrobial resistance have also been flagged, since they can lead to providing resistance to the bacteria through introduction of membrane modifications and increase in the production of efflux pumps. The former of these methods stops the antimicrobial molecules from attaching with the bacteria’s surface, thereby not letting them enter the organism and cause any damage, while the latter method pumps out any harmful molecules that have found their way into its cytoplasm [6].

In his book about microorganisms around and within us, I Contain Multitudes, Ed Yong mentions that in a hospital setting, not just unhygienic conditions, rather overtly clean surfaces can also carry several pathogenic bacteria. He pins this on the dysbiosis, or disturbance in the proportion of beneficial bacteria present in any setting, caused by a high use of antibacterial sanitizers. He also goes on to cite Dr Jack Gilbert’s work [7], who had been researching the microbiomes of built environments when the book came out in 2016 (a comprehensive review of the same was published in 2018). Dr Sean Gibbons, then a student of Dr Gilbert, studied the microbiome of restroom surfaces and concluded that toilets that are scrubbed and cleaned more often tend to have more faecal bacteria on them [8]. According to them, one of the solutions to make sure pathogenic bacteria do not get a hold of patients in hospital settings is to make sure that instead of exterminating all the bacteria, a healthy diversity of the so-called good bacteria are present on hospital surfaces. For that purpose, they have been developing a sort of probiotic concoction for it. [9]

Moving forward, I hope that certain changes in the way we understand and utilize antimicrobial agents, including antibiotics, are implemented. This might include developing SOPs and policy changes for the sale and use of antibiotics, conducting outreach activities to inform the general populace about the ill effects of their misuse, and thorough monitoring of antibiotic resistant bacteria and their functioning. Better antibiotic stewardship practices need to be implemented so that one day the examples of antibiotic misuse only remain a thing of the past. Research in the direction of discovering better alternatives to antibiotics and other antimicrobial compounds may also need to be fast tracked.

Acknowledgements:
I am grateful to Preethika Nair for discussing the first draft of this article with me.

References
1. A.K. Murray, “The Novel Coronavirus COVID-19 Outbreak: Global Implications for Antimicrobial Resistance.” Front. Microbiol., 2020, 11:1020. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2020.01020.
2. J.A. Bengoechea, & C.G. Bamford, “SARS-CoV-2, bacterial co-infections, and AMR: the deadly trio in COVID-19?” EMBO mol. med., 12(7), e12560, 2020. https://doi.org/10.15252/emmm.202012560.
3. B.D. Huttner et al. “COVID-19: don't neglect antimicrobial stewardship principles!” Clinical microbiol. and infection, 26(7), 808–810, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmi.2020.04.024.
4. R.M. Kariyawasam et al. “Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in COVID-19 patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis (November 2019–June 2021).” Antimicrob. Resist. Infect. Control 11(45), 2022. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13756-022-01085-z.
5. G. Sulis et al., “Sales of antibiotics and hydroxychloroquine in India during the COVID-19 epidemic: An interrupted time series analysis.” PLoS Med. 18(7): e1003682, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003682.
6. L.J. Bock, “Bacterial biocide resistance: a new scourge of the infectious disease world? (2019) Arch. Dis. Child. 104(11):1029-1033. doi: 10.1136/archdischild-2018-315090.
7. J.A. Gilbert, B. Stephens, “Microbiology of the built environment.” Nat. Rev. Microbiol. 16, 661–670, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41579-018-0065-5.
8. S.M. Gibbons, “Ecological succession and viability of human-associated microbiota on restroom surfaces.” Appl. and env. microbiol., 81(2), 765-773, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1128/AEM.03117-14.
9. Ed Yong, “I contain multitudes: the microbes within us and a grander view of life.” London, UK: The Bodley Head, an imprint of Vintage, 2016. Epub ISBN: 9781473520189.

International Conference on Rural Technology Development and Delivery (RTDD)

Prof. Anand Krishnan Plappally

News & Views

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IIT Jodhpur hosted International Conference on Rural Technology Development and Delivery (RTDD) 2022 during March 4-5, 2022. The conference had three different objectives:

1. To bring together faculty and students involved working in RuTAG from across India to come and share their interventions on the field.
2. To demonstrate to solve local region specific, ecosystem specific as well as climate specific challenges with appropriate technology.
3. To also enable awareness of integrated solution frameworks for demand driven problems with emerging know-how such as modeling, automation and digitization coming into perspective.

The international conference RTDD 2022 focussed and deliberated on different domains of rural technology as enumerated below including design and development of on-farm and non-farm technologies which have much required scientific temperament towards solving site specific demand driven rural problems. The RTDD 2022 Conference was held over two and half days (starting the morning of 4 March 2021 and finishing in the afternoon of 6 March 2021). The six thematic segments to the conference were: Rural Environment, Rural Education, Water Management and Agriculture Technology for Small farms, Energy or Power interventions for Rural Areas, Digitization for Rural Areas which included the eight sessions of talks over the three days of deliberations. Each session consisted of talks of 10 minutes each, followed by 5 minutes of discussion. Several papers were presented.

There were two important keynote lectures. Prof Winston Soboyejo from Worcester Polytechnic Institute gave a lecture titled "New Frontiers for Rural Technology and Development" and he stressed upon Africa-India-US technological collaborations over the last several decades and also prompted to look into the latest technologies that will influence rural development. He touched upon medicine, materials, health, water and energy as major areas where India should concentrate in the near future. Second keynote lecture was given by Prof Dharmedra Saraswat from Purdue University on "ICT for Plant Disease Management and Development of Early Warning Systems". He said that RuTAG and Purdue University are already having a tie up and that will be strengthened in the coming years. He stressed upon development of geospatial technologies and information communication technology for helping small farmers in India. There were 8 plenary talks from different RuTAG centers across the country.

National Science Day 2022: Invited Talk 'Invisible Empire: How viruses and microbes shape our world'

Mr. Pranay Lal

News & Views

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Thank you so much, Professor Santanu Chaudhury and Professor Mitali Mukherjee and of course, my friend, Professor Manoharan. I just wanted to, you know, congratulate the speakers who spoke before me. I mean, what a galaxy of stars. Some of my heroes from the scientific world Professor Partha Majumdar, Professor Rao, Professor Brahmachari, Professor Ashutosh Sharma; I've looked up to their work and their leadership in taking forward the whole agenda of science and scientific thinking. So I'm actually pretty much in trepidation and trembling just now, because I know it's a tough act to follow. But let me try telling you about what I think about a story that has been plaguing us for the last more than two years perhaps, and that's the rise of a virus that has unsettled the world. But I'm going to take a position from the other contrarian view about the microbial world and in particular, viruses.

This talk is based on a book that I've written, and the book itself is based on a podcast I did in May 2020. So I just want to take you first to an image from a French encyclopedia for housewives, and this image is from 1880. What this image shows is that there are three children with three different types of clinical manifestations of the skin. The one on the left is measles, the one in the center is scarlet fever, and the one on the right is smallpox. So, the reason why I bring this up is this, that soon after this phase of literature, or writing, the focus of medical research and writing shifted, because we entered an age of discovery, and not only the discovery of what microbes were or even viruses, but also the age of antibiotics. And within 30 years of discovering effective antibiotics, it was summarily dismissed in most medical textbooks. For example, in the 1962, textbook of infectious disease by Castle, it says that the end of the infectious diseases is near. And as a result, there has been very little study or emphasis on many infectious diseases that have been persistent or those that have been emerging. This image in particular becomes very, very important for us now, because it's a reminder that we may have pushed ourselves back into a more primitive mindset when we start exploring the fact that we have encountered pandemics. Like I said, pandemics or even outbreaks and epidemics, at least in more developed parts of the world, were considered to be a thing of the past. The emergence of COVID-19 has shown us that we may have not passed that threshold where we can discount the role of nature, and more importantly, the role of the microbial world, whether it's in positive light or the detrimental things that it can throw at us. So I'm just going to say that while we look at the negativities of the microbial world, we changed our narrative drastically from just a year prior to the outbreak of COVID 19. We were celebrating the discovery or rather the announcement that a major progress has been made in terms of new microbiological techniques, like using of CRISPR and for which the Nobel Prize for Medicine was given. So it's been a bit of a volte face in terms of how the world has viewed at one, at one moment as being euphoric, and, at another moment, at this being a time when we have to see ourselves in the perspective that the microbial world has reset for us.

I'm just going to be very quickly trying to tell you what I mean by the ‘microbial world’. If you were to look under a microscope and take a pinch of a moist soil from say, a pond or a bird bath, chances are that you would encounter a worm like this, which is called a nematode. Now, nematodes are really, really tiny if you have to really gaze with your naked eye to try spotting it. But it's rather simple to see it under a microscope. It's very elegant; it's the most abundant macroscopic creature in the world, in the sense that this is the most abundant metazoan in the world, that it's reported that about 57 billion nematodes exist for every human being. This worm-like creature is, is always pretty simple to find in pond water or on the edge of soils that are near ponds, or bird baths, or even rivers. Up next, if you were to bring down your field of vision a little more by say 10 times more, you encounter the slipper-shaped creatures, these are paramecium. I'm sure most of us who've studied biology, would remember this creature. They slink around over one another and extremely mesmerizing to look at. If you were to move your field vision a little along the slide or the drop of water that you have prepared as a hanging drop preparation, chances are that you might encounter very beautiful geometric creatures like this one. Now this is a solitary living algal body called Micrasterias. Now micro means small and asteria means sun. So it looks like the sun and it is under refracted light; it's absolutely beautiful to look at. And it can come in various colors, it can be greens, and yellows, and reds, and the pigments depend on the day, time of the day when you're looking at it and also the species. If you were to narrow down your field of vision, and in fact, increase the resolution of your microscope, you would encounter some fuzzy things like the one that is on the foreground of this image. Now, this is a stained image. None of these images are true or taken in one single vision. Let me put that rider; these are collected and seen under different kinds of microscope. So it's just a collection of images, please do not treat them as having been seen in one single vision. This is a stained slide, and the creature that you see in the foreground with the black and gray strands with what looks like heads of flowers is actually Aspergillus. It's a deadly fungus in humans, some species (three species) can be deadly to humans, but the other 80 odd species have no effect on humans or are actually soil dwelling fungi. The red- or the pink-colored single cell that you see is yeast cells, Saccharomyces. Now Saccharomyces can live in groups in bunches, or they can be solitary. What is critical to us is now looking at the smallest creature, and this is the virus. These are multiple viruses trying to attach themselves and you know, they are in a race to send their genes through the cell wall of this bacteria. Then there's a multitude of viruses, a variety of viruses. But then most cells and most creatures have very specific viruses very specific to the individual cells, and organs and even body types.

So having seen the diversity of what you see under a single drop of water, I just want to reiterate the fact that this about the size of different microscopic things that we encounter in our daily lives. To your right is a strand of hair (Fig. 1). I mean, just to show an average human hair, which could be 50-180 micrometers. But if you want to move towards the left, you come to the two disc-shaped red-colored objects that you see, and that's the red blood cell.

Figure 1

Let's move along, further to the left, you see these two blue sausage-shaped bodies, and that's an average bacterium. But let's move a little more left, and you see this brown spherical object, and that's wood smoke, the smallest particle, one of the smallest particles that the human eye can see. But again, let's move a little more left, and you see that red dot that's on the left, and that's the Coronavirus. It's one of the larger viruses; it's not the largest, but it's one of the larger viruses that we know. And to the left of that is the bacteriophage, the one that I showed you previously in this slide where the bacteria was being attacked by viruses. Such viruses are called bacteriophage; they look like space landers, I will have image later, which I will show you and to the left of that it's barely visible is a Zika virus. Zika virus is among the smallest known viruses that we know of. Of course, polio is also an extremely small virus. But while viruses are really small, we also have giant viruses.

I want to take you to a small story that started in 1992 on the top of a cooling tower, above a hospital in Bradford in Yorkshire. Now Bradford is an industrial town, and many of you would know Bradford because of Jack the Ripper, there is very little else that is memorable about the town. But for virologists, the discovery that happened here was incredible. Now in 1992, there was a mysterious pneumonia that was happening to patients who were admitted in the hospital, who were slightly low on immunity or immune-suppressed. And the cause of this pneumonia remained undiagnosed for a very long time. It wasn't lethal, but the pneumonia was persistent and the normal antibiotics that were being administered did not seem to work. The pathologist who was entrusted to find out what the cause of the outbreak was found that the creature that the life form that was isolated from the lungs was also found in the cooling towers of the hospital. But no matter how much he tried, he was unable to culture it that means he was not able to grow it in the Nutrient Agars and the medium to different microbiological mediums. The standard practice is that you if you are able to grow it, and you can see it under the microscope after a process called staining what is called Gram staining. So he nevertheless concentrated the cells that he was able to isolate from the lung samples and tried to stain this. And he found something very peculiar, because staining process generally gives a single color, either blue or pink. But in this case, he got both the colors in the cell. So clearly, this was very different bacteria, if at all, it was bacteria. He looked further and tried using other tests, microbiological tests, but he found that, you know, this was something very, very different. And unable to diagnose it any further, and given that there were huge cuts in the NHS, the UK Government in 1993-95, had major fund restrictions, and because of which, the scientist sent a sample to, to two French scientists in University of Marseille, and there it was languishing for about a year or two. And it was only after somebody remembered that you know, there was this mysterious fever outbreak that happened in in Bradford; let's look at that sample. And lo and behold, they found the same thing that that they were supposed to not see, you know this these two pink and blue cells.

They decided to put this under electron microscope and then they discovered something like this: They found that they were giant viruses in the center of these rounded cells when they teased out these viruses' out and let this the circular, you know the white matter in which they were living, they found that the, the host was actually an amoeba, it was something called acanthamoeba, one of the most primitive forms of amoeba that is alive today. And once they published this in a paper in Science, they were other discoveries that were reported from a thermal spring in Japan, and even from IIT Bombay from Powai Lake, and since then we've got about 20 odd species of these giant viruses that have been discovered. Now, these are rather simple to see even under a simple microscope. So the giant viruses actually can be pretty large, I mean, they can be giants, right, in the microbial sense. What makes giant viruses unique or really relevant for us is that they turned around the conversation on how and when, and what could have caused the evolution of viruses. I'm not going to go into it, but I'll do something shameless promotion of my book, I mean, if you really are interested in how viruses evolve the cells of all first of viruses, it's like a chicken and egg conversation, but you will have to read my book.

So, what we now know because of the nature of which we studied the structure of viruses and the genetic structure of viruses, we now know that there is a variety of shapes and even sizes, and also the types of genomic structures they have. So it can be DNA or RNA, they can be double-stranded or single-stranded, and even then there's complexity; there's something called positively-sensed and negatively-sensed. With so much diversity in the microbial and in particular, the viral world, the classification body of virologists, which is called the ICTV, International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, in 2020, decided to expand the seven-tiered Linnaean classification model, to 15 rank and model for viruses. And while this would upset the lumpers, but you know, there is no other way to accommodate the complexities that the wild world shows to us. And just want to make five propositions to you. My first proposition is that the viral world is an integral part of the microbial world at large, and they provide services that are absolutely unique and fascinating. And if we were to put them in the right perspective, in how they manage to balance the various forces of nature, we would have a greater appreciation of it. And my first contention is that the very breath that you and I take is made possible because of microbes and the role of viruses in particular, is incredible. Let me show you this image (Fig. 2). Some of you who've read my book, my previous book, Indica, would have would remember this image. Now this is the reclining Vishnu from Bandhavgarh. And Vishnu, as you know, is the preserver and the God who maintains the balance in nature.

Figure 2

Now, this statue is overlooking a placid pool. The pool is covered with what you and I would call slime, but for a microbiologist or somebody who studies algae, this is blue-green bacteria. Now, blue green bacteria are incredible creatures. There are at least 1000 known species of blue-green bacteria, and they dominate the top eight meters or more of ocean and sea water. And in lakes and ponds in freshwater, it can be the entire horizon that can be dominated by these bacteria. What is incredible about these creatures is that they evolved about 3.7 billion years ago, and they were found in the margins of wherever water met land, and they colonized and partnered with other bacteria, especially specialist bacteria that could break down and assimilate specific material and nutrients or elements. This is a is a fossil of a partnership. Now, this kind of a rock, which, in tombs, the fossils of cyanobacteria from 3 billion or older years, is called a stromatolite. Now, stromatolites basically are layered rocks, which show that layer upon layer, cyanobacteria, and a partner bacterium, was collaborating to grow into colonies, and a single rock like this, which is about a foot wide and long, covers at least a 10,000 to 15,000 years of constant growing. Now, what was remarkable about stromatolites was that they produce so much oxygen for the first two and a half billion years that they created Earth's atmosphere; they also caused the oxidation of most metals, for example, iron oxides, and calcium oxides and all those oxides that you see. Prior to this, most elements and most minerals were very simple and basic, they were no oxides. And the third thing they did was they created an ozone layer, and they produced so much oxygen during the 2 billion years that they dominated, they created the first major ice age of the earth, and that was the key event in Earth's history to not only produce all the water that we have in oceans that are filling the basins and rivers that we have in the world today. But it also created the chance or the opportunity of leapfrogging from unicellular life to multicellular life, because once that availability of oxygen and oxides and the ozone layer protecting vulnerable cells from expanding and accreting together to create more complex life, this whole process enabled the evolutionary leap for a far more complex life, especially multicellularity. Now, having done this, all this oxygen being made available and triggering more complex life to arise, we find that the blue-green bacteria continue to dominate the ocean waters.

Now as human beings, we tend to focus more on land; we love to see our forests and our deserts and grasslands, but very few of us actually pay attention to what happens in the oceans. Most of the oxygen production that happens, most of the free oxygen that is produced also is not from forests, or grasslands, but from the oceans. You remember that I said that eight meters of seas and oceans are actually dominated by single-celled creatures. And among them is a creature that you see along the equatorial belt, you the bright green colored suede that you see across the globe, is a champion organism called Prochlorococcus. It wasn't discovered till the mid-1990s, and this is the most abundant cell outside of the viruses. The Prochlorococcus and its cousin Synechococcus, which you see in sky blue color, is perhaps the two organisms that work together and produce anything between 20-24% of all the oxygen that is produced on earth. Now, what is remarkable about the blue-green bacteria - the varieties that exist, is that they have a very short lifespan. And because they are in the ocean, and once death occurs, their cells sink into the depths of the ocean. Now, let me digress a little and tell you that our fossil fuels that were made 300 million years to about 200 million years ago, are all embedded in deep into the earth, for example, oil and gas and coal, all of this lies in the depths of the earth. Once they are taken out from there and burned, they're consumed for produce energy, the carbon dioxide stays inside the atmosphere. That's the cause of concern that we have and that's the reason why we have you know, global warming and therefore climate change. The mitigating measures that we have proposed is to plant trees and have direct to air capture. The challenge is that both these measures would leave the carbon on the surface, right? Because trees accumulate carbon if efficiently, but they also stay on the surface and they are prone to decomposition, and worse, to wildfire. Now in either situation, the carbon gets released very quickly, as we speak, there's a massive fire in Argentina, and last year, we had massive fires in California, Australia, Russia, and even for the first time in the permafrost region of the Arctic. Now, with so much carbon dioxide exposed, whether it's organic carbon, in the form of vegetation, or it's in the form of other things like fossil fuels. The burning makes sure that the carbon dioxide gets released quickly, and for this reason, organisms that are on the top of ocean layers and lakes and ponds and go and bury themselves after they die into the depths of the oceans, or lakes stay there for thousands and perhaps even millions of years, some of them even get converted into a petroleum. So the efficiency by which carbon gets buried is in the seas. In the high seas, and therefore, the role of oceans, seas, and rivers becomes even more important, if we are looking at mitigation.

Now, where does virus fit in into the story? I told you that the champion creatures are Prochlorococcus and the Synechococcus, right. Now, these, like I said anything between 20 to 24% of all free oxygen is produced by them, but their lifecycle in normal circumstances would be two to seven days. But the presence of viruses like these --- they have very specific viruses, and for each strain or Prochlorococcus, there is a specific phage remember, I use the word phage as in the virus that eats bacteria, bacteriophage. Now, bacteriophage accelerate the killing off bacteria, right. Now Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus have very specific viruses that kill them, and so is it for another creature called Trichodesmium. Trichodesmium is, in the oceans, the most important or the most efficient organism that digests and assimilates and recycles nitrogen. And microcystis does the same for sulfur and, and there are several other microbes and their viruses that ensure and regulate this process. So the viruses are efficient undertakers of this whole process, the whole ocean lifecycle, and also on the surface of lakes and rivers and also moist soils. These creatures are working together, one predating on the other, but ensuring that there is a constant balance in their numbers, which keeps the oxygen-carbon cycle in balance. And the same is true for trichodesmium, which does it for nitrogen; the same is true for microcystis which tries to manage or regulate the entire sulfur cycle. So the beauty of this finely calibrated, interlinked cycle of elements nutrients and minerals is orchestrated between the viruses and different microbes. And if the viruses were to go on a strike, say they decide to go for a strike for a year, or even a month, there would be a massive oxygen crisis and our oceans and seas would start looking like the sewage lines that we have in our country, right? Thick and, and piling up with green gunky material. And that is what's going to be the fate of water bodies. So we must accord some responsibility and some importance to this delicate relationship between the viruses and the larger microbial world. So I hope I have made my first proposition of trying to convince you that the free air that you and I breathe, the free oxygen that you and I get, that each of our breath, is courtesy the processes that are happening in the open seas, and that's how the oxygen and the carbon dioxide and the free composition that we have is largely because of how these creatures orchestrate their processes on a daily basis.

I'm now going to move to my second proposition: I'm going to make a very, very strong claim. My submission to you is that after the sun and plate tectonics, it's the viruses and the microbial world in general, that have powered evolution forward. Other than the oxygen contribution that was done by the stromatolites and the blue-green bacteria and the viruses, there is something even larger that has been done in the past. And I'm going to start with a story of this fish on the left. Now, this is a Coelacanth; it was discovered accidentally in a deep sea trawling event that was happening in Comoros Island, and it was a chance discovery that was made by a family of South Africans called the Latimer family. Now, Coelacanth is a very unique fish. It possibly emerged around 410 million years ago, well before the time of the dinosaurs. Now, it's a fish that lives in submarine volcanic regions, and it lives in caves, you can see that it's in a hollow-like structure in deep sea. It has very unique scales, it has very unique eyes, what is really unique about it, it's got a muscular fin and a very muscular tail. Now, deep sea divers who have photographed and pictured the movement of Coelacanth have narrated that they've seen this fish actually climb the vertical walls of caves, trying to find small hag worms or even small plant material for its daily consumption.

The muscular fin and the muscular tail is something that is unique to this fish and there are only a couple of other fish like lungfish that have this. Now how to what is really important about developing a muscular fin is that chance infection that happened to an ancestor or a predecessor of the coelacanth caused this fin, which is otherwise non-muscular in other fish, become muscular. Now, the infection that happened was the one that you see on the right now that's the virus that caused it. Now it's called a foamy virus. Now foamy viruses are RNA viruses. So once they infect, they cause the tissue to become a bit bubbly or like foam, and that's why they're called foamy viruses, and in some instances, the RNA of the virus goes and integrates in the DNA, and that's when this incredible leap in evolution happens. A muscular fin and a muscular tail were the essential ingredients for the first steps to take place on land. So the amphibians, also have a foamy virus of amphibian, the ancestors or rather the descendants of this fish or something like this would have evolved into something that became an ancestor of the amphibians, carrying this foamy virus and then adding new foamy viruses, to develop a forelimb and a hind limb and a muscular tail. And that creature or a creature, something like of that nature, was the one that eventually took the first bold steps out of the sea and colonized land. And since then, there have been subsequent and repeated foamy virus infections, causing the physiology of all creatures to constantly evolve and create new kinds of limbs and musculature and symmetries.

Now, this is only one aspect of that infection. I wanted to bring you an infection that happened, which is which you might relate to more closely to. Now this is an image from about 255 million years ago. This is the time when the land was dominated by this creature on the left, which is called a Lystrosaurus. Now, this is an amphibian about the size of your auto rickshaw, and these were grazers. They needed to come close to water to lay the eggs and for the young to grow, but they moved in herds quite like cows or antelopes, and they would graze on cycads and ferns and lycopods. The creature on the top right is the ancestor of the modern-day alligator or crocodile. But the creature that we are interested in at the moment is the one at the bottom right - the one which is standing on top of another lizard-like thing, and it looks a bit like a mongoose but this is a true reptile. But there are signs to this that show that it is not really a true reptile, like the one we imagine. It does have a scaly mouth and it has hollow fang-like teeth. It has scaly tail, and scaly legs, but it also has hair-like protrusion on its back. Now, this is the first sign that you see in this creature, this creature called Thrinaxodon. We've found fossils of an accident in Andhra Pradesh, for example, and even in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. This is where, you know, we find the first mammalian signs of developing hair on a scaly skin. Now, why is it important that we're talking about this? Now mammal-like reptiles diverged into two broad parts: the first stayed very reptilian, and they became the ancestors to the Monotremes. Now the monotremes, like the platypus or the echidna, still lay eggs, and they have a poison gland and they have spurs on their hind legs. They also have the scaly underbelly. So they have a lot of similarities with the reptilian ancestor that you see before you. The other stream that evolved is the true mammals that is, like us, or the dogs or the cats and the camels and all of those, and they developed what is unique to true mammals, which is a placenta, that means the ability to give live birth. Now, I'm not going to go into the history of the placenta, the placenta is a fascinating organ. It is completely developed by a protein that is a viral origin, if that viral protein is inactive or is absent in a person which is highly unlikely, the chances of that female to conceive is next to nothing. There is also another a viral gene that is embedded in our genome, which protects us from causing spontaneous abortions. Now, remember that this is a viral protein that is creating an entire organ using nutrients from the human body, right. So everything that it does inside the body is foreign, and the chances that the human immune system rejects it is very high. But in order to keep the placenta intact, there is another viral gene, that actually modulates down your immune system from overreacting and rejecting a placenta. So, in a sense, it's paradoxical that our own birth is something that is concocted or orchestrated or conspired by the act of viruses. So it feels like the film Alien, right, where you have an alien injecting something into your body, and then it multiplies inside you. Well, that's exactly what happens when a person conceives, this protein gets triggered and a placenta is formed.

I'm now going to present to you my third submission which is on defensing -- defenses that are created by viruses themselves. Now, viruses are known to us as pathogens, but there are more viruses that do more good than viruses that do bad to us, and this is a very, very interesting area of exploration in science and something that is not often talked about. Now, as soon as we are born, if we are born through a normal birth canal, we get laced with lactobacilli and several other important microbes that we get from our mother. But even as we are fed by a mother's milk, and also by diet that infants are given, we acquire microbiome, which is very similar to our own parents. Now, that microbiome also has a very rich signature of viruses. I'm going to first show you this image - this is herpes virus. We know of eight herpes viruses that affect the human populations, and we actually have anything between two to six of them at any time. Chances of us getting say, chickenpox or herpes zoster which is a very painful condition. Herpes Zoster is basically known as shingles, it happens and when you're older and slightly in your 30s, 40s, or 50s, and you get this on one side of your body. Now, this is a virus that actually lives in nerve ends, or at the end of your cutaneous and subcutaneous boundary. What it also can do is start circulating inside your bloodstream, and then it has a role that until 2016 was not known to virologist. What we now know is that a rich viral load of what we now consider are benign viruses which otherwise do not cause disease, and are actually beneficial to a host because they keep the immune system primed, but they also lock out viruses from entering you. For example, if a receptor has been occupied by a virus that is circulating within your body, chances of another virus utilizing that as a portal of entry is therefore negligible.

Now, what we also know, through several genetic studies, genetic studies of viruses, but also increasingly, the DNA that Dr. Partha Majumder was talking about, such bidirectional studies of genomes or viruses and humans, is informing us that there have been multiple exchanges of both disease-causing viruses as well as beneficial microbes across our human ancestors. And this 7-million-year-old family portrait, if I can say that word, from our earliest ancestors who began to walk upright, to the modern day ancestors and as Professor Partha Majumder said there were at least four known cousins of the homo sapiens that lived alongside them, and which enabled a constant exchange of microbes, especially of viruses. And that enrichment has been something which is important because it has not only made us susceptible to disease --- that's the popular theory that we follow --- but we do not look at the underside that there is a lot of benefit that the other viruses that we are now discovering, that have actually protected us from other potentially more lethal infectious diseases. And among them is this virus; now it doesn't look like much, right? It looks like a cluster of just gray blobs and this is called Anellovirus. Anelloviruses have been found to be extremely, extremely beneficent, in people who have low immunity or are immune compromised and people who have a high titer of anelloviruses have been found to be protected from otherwise extremely lethal infections that they would have acquired in the hospital or during the operations that they have to undergo several times. So carrier carriers of anelloviruses of different varieties of universes now there are about forty known anelloviruses in humans, which are found in different people. So, this is an area of immense importance. What was once thought to be extremely striking, for example, the cerebrospinal fluid or even the human urine, we now know that there are several varieties of viruses that actually inhabit our bodies. And it's only a matter of time when we actually start cataloging and discovering the benefits of viruses that live within us.

I'm now going to come to my fourth submission, which is on Order and Disorder --- the balance of how viruses and the microbial world survives within each individual. Until not too far ago, we used to believe that there were 100 trillion bacteria that lived in our body as against 10 trillion human cells. Now, that was a guesstimate made in a correspondence in a journal, which actually found its way into medical textbooks, and then it became a bit of an urban legend. And that was a number that everybody who studies the microbiology or virology tended to believe. But then in 2016, scientists in the Weizmann Institute in Israel decided to test this, and they found that there are 39 trillion bacteria as against 30 trillion human cells, that means there are for every human cell, there is 1.3 bacterial cell in our body, that means 30% more bacteria live in our body than our own cells, right. But in terms of mass, it is really, really tiny. Because we've got cells, like the fatty cells, they are very large, you know, they can be few centimeters, or a few inches long, fatty cells, or even muscle cells and nerve cells, they're very large cells, and they're bulky cells. And as a result, while the volume of our own cells is large, and the mass is large, the numbers of bacteria are much higher in in a human being. So 39 trillion bacteria to 30 trillion human cells. I mean, that's the ratio that you must remember. Now, what we now know is that the dominant, if you want to ask a dentist, I mean, try it on your dentist. Sometimes, if your dentist has studied in the 60s 70s 80s, or even in the 1990s, ask him or her what is the dominant bacteria and a mouth, chances are, they will say it's pediococcus. Well, we now know this is this is a cross-section on the human tongue, right, there's actually a top view of the human tongue, and the different colors that you see a different colonies of bacteria, and they reside there and they perform specific functions. For example, if you've had something really hot, or something really cold, if you had something very sour or bitter, different bacteria will act up and ensure that it does not damage your tongue, or more importantly, start neutralizing what you've consumed before it reaches your stomach. So the whole process of digestion and pre-digestion begins with your tongue. And these organisms that you're seeing this beautiful colored image, false- color composite is awful human tongue and immense variety of organisms are there for a specific purpose. Right.

So the discovery of the microbes that live within us is a very recent phenomenon. The multitudes we contain our unknown to us, and they decide about everything that we do, it decides on how much mass we are going to have by just looking at the microbiome, scientists are able to decipher whether you are within the normal BMI or not. Whether you have the Monday morning blues, you know, it's that's the range of you know, estimates that scientists can make if they have your microbiological profile of the different organs of your body. So it's getting sophisticated and organisms, as they get discovered, are a true revelation of who we are. Let me just also reiterate that I studied Microbiology in the 1990s and we were told that the dominant gut organism is this creature called Escherichia coli and this is the most studied bacteria in microbiology, at least human microbiology. Agrobacterium is for agricultural microbiology and for human biology is Escherichia coli. It's a standard organism, that test organism that we use. But it's now been discovered that Escherichia coli is easy to culture. And therefore, it was estimated to be the most dominant, the most prevalent organism in your gut. But if culturing procedures and ways to isolate and growing could be improved, and as they have happened, we've discovered that the dominant creatures are actually something else. It's bacteroides. This is an organism that is important, and seen most often, in people who consume more meats and eggs and milk, and then there are two other organisms called Prevotella and Ruminococcus. Now both of these are seen in people who take more fruits and vegetables and high fiber and their proportions decide on how healthy your gut is and how good your systems are, and whether you're going to gain your gain weight in the future or not. Of course, it depends on how much you exercise and many other factors. I'm trying to put it rather simplistically. But what I'm trying to drive at is that the organisms in your gut actually decide who you are truly. But for a very long time, it was not known that these organisms exist, and how do they work together, or how do they colonize the different parts of the human gut. But the fundamental question that intrigued scientists was that if there is so much fermentation, digestion, assimilation that is happening in the stomach after we have a hearty meal, why is it that our stomachs don't burst open, because after all, these organisms are all competing for food, and they produce gases, and they produce acids, and all those things that we know that these individual bacteria can do. Well, genetic studies in 2017, from across different countries that were analyzing for viruses in feces on normal human subjects, found regularly traces of viral genes that showed that there was a single class of dominant virus, and it was not known for a very, very long time, because it was very difficult to isolate it. But then they found using computer sciences and genomics and they identified this virus this class of viruses called the CrAssphage virus. Now, it sounds crass, it's actually spelt as crass but it's a Cr small, with a capital A and two small S’s, so crass with a capital A in the center. Now what does it stand for? It stands for computer-assembled viruses. So computers were used to piece together the different genes that they isolated from human feces, and put this together and said, you're looking for a virus that will have these genomes, and lo and behold, they searched and they found this in copious numbers. So think about it, the viral overlord that controls our gut, and the composition of the microbial residents in our stomach, and intestines, and everywhere else, was unknown till 2017. And we have given it a name, which is also not something based on the features or the physical, or the biochemical properties of the virus; we've given it a name, which is largely on the way we discovered the virus, which is CrAssphage.

I want to bring to your notice this bacterium. Now this bacterium is called Ralstonia. Ralstonia was discovered in 1890 in Brazil, when a lot of food crops from South America were being transported all across the world if especially Africa and Florida, and Southeast Asia. Now this creature is something that was found in the soils of Brazil and Argentina and the Central American region. And it was known to infect eight root crops and some stem crops, but largely root crops, especially potato. Now, what is unique about Ralstonia is that it's extremely mobile bacteria. It's got a tuft of flagella at one end, which makes it extremely motile, and as soon as it rains or there is a splatter of water, this bacterium is able to find its way to a new plant. It's extremely, extremely pernicious and ubiquitous. What we know now is that from those eight plants that it infected, there are over 400 plants that it now infects in the New World, for example, tea. Now, there was no tea in South America but the tea that it encountered in India, Sri Lanka and China is now devastated by this bacterium, and it continues to infect potato globally. In fact, the damage that Ralstonia causes exceeds $5 billion every year. It was the first bacteria to be added to the US bioterror list. But as this bacterium moved into new countries, it also found a new predator. Now, this is one of those predators. Again, this is a bacteriophage. Now, bacteriophage, like I mentioned, look like space landers, they come and land on bacteria; they are very specific, unrelated, a bacteriophage will not infect this bacterium. And of course, it's a completely chance event because viruses do not have chemotaxis. At least, we don't know of that, and it's a completely random process of how they will land on the cell surface of a bacterium or any other cell for that matter. So it is the chance event that has to take place for the bacteriophage to actually go ahead and infect Ralstonia or any other bacterium. But once it does, that, the annihilation is complete. And they create several copies of themselves, which are then ready to infect more of the host that they infect.

Now, this is something that can be of immense value to the humankind. Now, why do I say that? Before the discovery of anti-microbials, antibiotics in particular, viruses, particularly the bacteriaophages were critical to fight infectious disease. Between World War I and World War II, bacteriaophages were used in the trenches where soldiers were fighting especially if they develop diarrhea, or if they had battle wound, especially gangrene. There were specific phages that were identified, and they were administered and Polish soldiers, German soldiers, especially General Rommel's cache of arms and medical supplies that were found in Tobruk found vials of bacteriophages. And it was clearly marked and this has to be given in the case of diarrhea, this has to be given in the case of wounds. You know, it was very, very specific. And there are only a few countries that continue to practice the phage therapy, even today, mainly Georgia, Poland, Russia, a few other countries where phage therapy is legitimately used. Phage therapy is also legitimately used for Staphylococcus aureus in skin infections in cats and dogs in the US, but it's not permitted for use in human beings. Now, that's a travesty, because you are not using nature to fight nature, the problems that, you know can be cured by a nature-based solution. And this is an area where the future of medicine perhaps lies, especially when we see the rise of antimicrobial resistance, where conventional antibiotics are failing us, and this is something that I want to share with you -- two important examples where people were saved by using phage therapy.

I don't know whether all of you recognize this, but this is an enlargement from The Beatles album called Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart. Now this is an enlargement because on the right, you would see John Lennon in the yellow jacket. The two people gentleman on the bottom left are Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. Above Ringo Starr is Marlon Brando. But the person of interest to us in this image is the gentleman with the big hat. Now this gentleman goes by the name of Tom Mix. During the silent era, he was the single largest superstar of the Hollywood world, especially in the cowboy films, and, you know, there were cereals and you know, and soup cans that were named after his name. But in November 1931, at the onset of the talkie cinema, there was something that happened to Tom Mix, and he fell down; he developed a very bad case of peritonitis. Thankfully, he was in Hollywood in Los Angeles, and the Stanford Medical School had a very vibrant department of Microbiology; they were able to diagnose the peritonitis; they were able to identify and classify the bacteria that was causing the peritonitis. They had a collection of vials, which were targeted to this specific bacterium that was causing the peritonitis, and then they applied that in the gut of Tom Mix. There was no antibiotic in 1931; no effective antibiotic; penicillin was still a few years away, and sulfonamides were still in the very early days, and they were not effective on peritonitis. So when the phage was used on Tom Mix, they worked wonders and he was up and about and his Hollywood career resumed.

The other person is somebody you might all recognize this is Elizabeth Taylor in May 1961. She had returned from Egypt after shooting for the film Cleopatra, but as soon as she arrived in London, or a day or two later, she collapsed in a hotel and it was found that she had a severe case of pneumonia, and they had to do an emergency tracheotomy in the hotel itself because she was unable to breathe, she was gasping for air, and she was taken to a hospital where the conventional penicillin was not working. But there was a new type of penicillin that was discovered called methyl penicillin. But at the same time, the doctors were saying that they could not take the risk of using just methyl penicillin because it wasn't proven to work against the deadly Staphylococcus aureus. They knew that there was a lab in Philadelphia, which had bacteriophages that worked very well on Staphylococcus aureus; so they called out for that. And there was a special shipment that left Philadelphia from the Delmont Labs, the one I was telling you about for that makes that continues to make bacteriophages for cats and dogs, but not for humans. But it perhaps alongside with methyl penicillin, worked and saved the life of Ms Taylor. But sadly, what happened was that the New York Times and other papers highlighted the importance of methyl penicillin, and forgot to mention phage therapy. And as a result phage therapy has since then been forgotten. Now here's something which is nontoxic, very specific, and exits the body, the human body, as soon as it finds its host, in this case, staphylococcus aureus. As soon as the it has exterminated all the staphylococcus aureus, the virus will leave your body because it doesn't find any more staphylococcus in your bloodstream. So something as clean and effective is has been ignored for several years, and I think it's time that phage therapy comes back into practice.

And my final point: Without viruses and the microbial world, our world would be less beautiful. And let me just show you what I mean. Tulips are usually single colored. Some of them are two-colored, but they're small, and they're not as impressive when you see them in the wild. They look like normal lilies; they actually closely related to the lily family, but they're not something spectacular. But once the bulbs of tulips left Venice and reached Spain and from Spain, they went to Holland --- and this is in the late 1500s --- they encountered a virus that was found in trees that served as a reservoir. The trees that were of apricots, cherries and plums, and you know, those kinds of trees and there was a common virus that was found that also could infect potato and potato was introduced in Europe. It's called the Potyvirus. Poty standing for Potato and Vi is virus. So the potato virus was the one of the viruses that infected the bulbs, and it caused the tulips to become spectacular from being very predictable red and yellow or plain-colored, they started to develop streaks and lines and different colors. In fact, at one time, the craze for tulips became so grand that ships laden with spices and linen and silks from India and China could be purchased by using just a single bulb of tulip if it was grand and beautiful. That's the price that people were willing to pay for it. In fact, the craze went so out of hand that the first economic bubble in the world is actually called tulip mania. Now, tulips actually caused such a frenzy in Amsterdam, and in much of Holland that people were betting on and putting the homes and warehouses and factories and chips on mortgage just to own a very fancy tulip. And once that came crashing, the first economic bubble also burst open. My second proposition is that this is how wild grapes look like. Now the red thing that you see is called a pedicel. Now pedicel is a wasteful thing, because it's not edible. In fact, the wild grape itself is not edible, because it's very bitter. The seed is large, and the pulp is very acidic. But what the virus has done for us, they've been three successive viral infections that created the buncee group that we know I'm not going to go into the details again, please buy my book. Rice in wild now this is a picture that I have taken in Jorhat. This is how the wild rice looks like. Notice that the spikes and spikelets at the bottom and on the top have not matured right. They are not ripe; they're not ready for harvest. But a series of viral infections have ensured that the rice that you and I consume that has been now been, you know agriculturally possible is something that ripens simultaneously. And this is something that has been an endowment given to us by the viral kingdom.

So, and my final submission is that the American Chestnut, this ghostly images that you see of trees; bottom right just for scale, you can see a car, very tiny car; it looks like a tempo, but it's actually a huge Ford T. But the chestnut forests of America were completely devastated by an imported fungus. And once that fungus had taken root in just about every chestnut tree, the trees would die a very slow death. But then in Europe, some scientists found that there are two kinds of fungus -- one is the extremely belligerent and virulent orange colored fungus, the one that caused the decimation of the American chestnuts. But they also found a benign version of it, it's a gray fungus, which had a virus in it. But if you if you apply the exit date of the gray, a benign virus, chances are that the orange virulent variety turns gray and becomes absolutely benign, and the tree would survive. Now the whole process of recovery is taking place after 50 years or 60 years of its discovery. And slowly the chestnut forests of America are recovering thanks to a virus that lives within the fungus that actually causes that disease. So by finding a virulent version, or and its own antidote in the body of the fungus, we're now able to use it against itself. So the virus actually neutralizes a virulent fungus.

And my final takeaway points are this: Why did I write a book on viruses when everybody was grappling and cursing the microbial world and viruses in particular? I thought there is something more to the virus story, and I think I've tried making five submissions to you. I have seven other submissions in my book, please go ahead and read it. Sorry, it's a hard sell by an author. But the point is that nothing in nature is wasteful. We are the ones who assign or castigate that wastefulness that this is evil and this is good and we also label life forms as bugs and critters, slimes, weed, gunk, you know, whatever it is. Now, I think we do this at our own peril if we are calling blue-green bacteria or cyanobacteria as slime or gunk or whatever we want to call it, we are being unfair to ourselves, because these are the creatures that are producing all the oxygen and sinking a carbon into the depths of the oceans. Right? The same thing is with the viruses. I think it's time we stop generalizing and labeling things wrongly. And it's not only good for science, but it's also good for public relations and for building a better perspective when it comes to the public. Because once something which is creepy and crawly is thought to be bad, everything has to be killed. That's not true. So my fervent plea is that please do not label all life forms as being derogatory, or being out there to get the human race. That's not true at all. The more important thing is for students of IIT Jodhpur is to question everything. There cannot be a very simple, straightforward answer to complex natural phenomena. And for this, you need to stay curious, you need to ask questions, you have to ask for counterfactuals; you have to get into critical thinking, and you need to continue to question the methodology, the findings and the rigor with which science gives you answers. Thank you so much for this opportunity. Again, Dr. Santanu Chaudhary and Professor Mitali Mukherjee and everyone at IIT Jodhpur for inviting me. Thank you so much.

Watch the full video at https://youtu.be/joNQuw_q1RA

National Science Day 2022: Invited Talk 'A Brief History of Future: India's Journey in S&T'

Prof. Ashutosh Sharma

News & Views

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As humanity stands at the horizon of normality after an unprecedented year following the global pandemic, the role and the future of education has never been more relevant, critical and uncertain. If anything, the past year has taught us how to expect the unexpected and if we aspire to achieve fruitful results from the education patterns, the changes we make should take into account both situations, the ones that are probable and the ones that are not.

Thank you very much indeed for inviting me to this extraordinary session. And I'm so glad perhaps I'm the last speaker here, which has some advantages. Because Dr. Chidambaram and Dr. Brahmachari and Dr. Partha Majumder have covered a lot of history in terms of the journey of science and technology in India, as well as where we might possibly be heading. So I would actually latch on to where we'll possibly be heading, rather than the history, but then, of course, the future is only a modified history. So there are some lessons from there, and essentially, what I would like to talk about very quickly, is what are the overarching structures and the processes and the architecture of doing science and technology with some effectiveness and quality. And what are the new challenges which are coming at us at ever faster rate. Of course, if we were to look at things that happened in last 75 years in India, one way to look at them would be to look sector-wise, to say, look what happened in transport wherever we are we now and that is a compelling journey, indeed. If we were to enumerate some of the stuff that was impactful, it came out of science, technology and innovation, I would always speak of science and technology and innovation in the same breath. And the reason for that is that transforming science, the bridge of science to society is through technology and innovation.

So if we were to look at education, of course, we set up these great institutions making a huge impact both for Indian economy and in fact, globally. Policies have played a very important role and the latest one is National Education Policy 2020. If we could implement half of it, we would be through. Of course, look at food, water sanitation: there have been so many revolutions; green, white, yellow, blue, and now coming to the blue revolution, which is basically mapping and looking at the resources of the oceans, Sulabh, Har Ghar Jal, Swatchh Bharat, tractor, for example, and even pumps. This is basically what got us where we are now, in health and medical family planning Asha, generic drugs, vaccines. The COVID-19 time showed us a whole lot of ventilators and diagnostics that came up really, really quickly, building on the foundations that we had laid over decades; Jaipur foot, Sree Chitra heart --- really there are lots and lots of this stuff over there. I may also add to it the open drug discovery platform that was championed by Dr. Brahmachari in the CSIR, which was a very compelling aspect of looking at health and medical for the future. Three-wheelers, e-rickshaws, metros, that came up quickly, and so on. And then of course, we can look at things which have happened with so rapidly in information and communication technologies, the rise of digital, this is the Industry 3.0, in a sense, we pole-vaulted, we leapfrogged. And it was very hard to have, in fact, a phone line at your home at one point, and now everybody's got this stuff in their pocket writing on it. The knowledge network that was set up by Dr. Chidambaram when he was PSA, national supercomputing mission, a whole lot of stuff is happening there: cyber physical systems, quantum technologies and others. In terms of governance, a whole lot of examples are given in that we use for voting, voting machines, advisories and warnings which are delivered to our fishermen and farmers. And every time before there's a tornado and what have you saving lives, giving a digital identity through UID and Aadhaar, and then going for direct benefit transfer, plugging in lots of leakages new policies on deregulating, on liberalization and democratization, on mapping, on drones, these are our very latest vintage. Satellite imaging in terms of opening up the space sector, the defense sector and so on, in imaging, and 'atma nirbhar bharat' --- through all of these interventions. innovation ecosystem has really come up very rapidly in the last seven to eight years, 10 years, maybe. It was very hard to convince my PhD students more than 10 years ago to do anything with the startups. But they are flowing freely. Even that grassroots innovation and the traditional knowledge, find their own space. In all of this, of course, energy, things like ultra-advanced supercritical, again championed by Dr. Chidambaram - supercritical solar and nuclear --- a whole lot of this has been contributed by Dr. Chidambaram and the teams that went around. So all of this is common knowledge.

So we can you know, there are chapters devoted to each one of these, there are books which are devoted to each one of this. So, one can't really go very deeply into this, saying, look, of course, the fact is that we built upon the strong foundations that were led in terms of our human resources, in terms of our infrastructure, in terms of training of science and technology personnel. So where are we now? The good news and what our reasons for optimism looking at the future? We are #3, globally in terms of number of scientific papers, which includes lot of cutting-edge areas like engineering, nanotechnology, in materials, even in artificial intelligence. India is #3 in number of startups and even unicorns. And like I said, well, if you look 10 years ago, we were #10 in number of scientific papers; startups and unicorns were unheard of. Now, India has deep strengths in R&D, and its R&D institutions from universities to IITs, to R&D labs and so on. Demography is a huge plus; we are a young country of educated young people, energetic young people that are basically ready for action; they are looking for action and they are ready for action. The human resources, very deep strengths in there. And enabling policies and of course, very diversified markets and demand, which nobody can ignore, which basically means, you know, India is a diverse country. In fact, Partho talked about it from a different perspective, which is actually good, which basically means that there is a space for all sorts of science, technology and innovation to satisfy the demands of this market. Just to tell you even simple biomedical devices today, about 80% of them are imported, and there's absolutely no reason at all, that this could not be done very rapidly and on a scale. Of course, there's always a but so, we must also focus on the part going forward in the future. So while we may be okay, being at #3 in terms of quantity of scientific papers, one has to focus on the quality and their impact on their relevance and their direction. Because without relevance and direction, they are not going to connect anywhere, and this is especially true of applied sciences of technology of engineering, of markets and society at large.

There is of course, the perpetual conflict between the profound and incremental, between disruptive and business as usual. Are we looking at leadership in some areas, many areas of science and technology are being contended as being followers of the latest fashion and the trends that come from somewhere else? In other words, do we have any India-centric ideas, of course, when we looking at basic sciences, we are looking at the conflict between profound and incremental; when we are looking at applied sciences and maturing to technology and markets, we are looking at India-centric problems. So it is something like local while science or very fundamental science may be global, its transformation into applications is often local, which is to have understanding of actually who we are, and what our problems are, where the gaps are. And those gaps are to be filled with innovation, which of course, is a new mantra that you know more and more people understand and operate on, that connects of science to all its stakeholders. And of course, industry and society are some of the gap areas that going forward in the future, that one would have to focus very tightly. So this talk is not about a particular problem or area of S&T that we of course that if I work in some area, I go to a particular conference, and I read certain papers I know all about it. It's not about what the future technologies would be or its specific products, or technology and what their shape would be. So what is it about? It's a broad picture of the drivers and directions of science and technology globally, and of course, in the Indian context, and how it's going to impact us. What are the emerging challenges and opportunities of the future? And what are the structure and processes of the mind that can understand those challenges, not only understand challenges, but can leverage them.

So when we talk about our science and technology and directions and determinants, and that basically tells us not the specifics, but it tells us what is it that we would expect; it could image the future. And of course, extrapolating from these directions, we can even come to some specific products and so on. So in a broad brush picture, let us first start it will start with where actually, science and technology comes from, what are the drivers, and of course, the fortunes of science and technology have been very greatly intertwined with various industrial revolutions. And it works both ways so that while science affects technology, technology affects science through its tools that develop; and at the same time, both of them impact society, but society's will, in turn works on the directions that you know, flourish in science, applied sciences and their applications. So, the first time actually, I came across the different hierarchical needs of the mind was in Psychology 101 in my BTech program, and of course, this is the famous Maslow's Motivational Model. What is it that the mind wants? And that actually tells us what kind of stuff in knowledge would actually come and flourish. We all know that there is such a thing as you know, nothing happens until it is an idea whose time has come. So if we were to look at the base of this parameter, it's about psychological needs, about needs for safety, it's about needs of belonging and love and connecting, it's about esteem. Together, all of these needs are called deficiency needs. If we move up this hierarchy, now, I don't mean when you say move up that there is something you know extraordinary about those and that they are more important in some sense, there is actually something which is a moot point. But anyway, going up the pyramid, these are called growth needs, cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, need of self-actualization, whatever that may mean, and the need for transcendence, whatever that may mean. But in a sense, we understand intuitively actually, what these things mean. Now, very interestingly, the idea that came to my mind at some point, is saying, "look, all of science and technology today, the modern science and technology is actually addressing very compellingly, no doubt, the needs which are called deficiency needs". It was not always like that. So if you were to look at pre-industrial societies, they didn't have a whole lot of technology, they have technology, which is evolving slowly, and then this trying to fulfill these very basic needs about roti kapda and makaan, so to say in a metaphorical way, but they were actually a whole lot of more focus on the needs that are called growth needs. So, in a sense, this is the internal world of the mind and there is an external world of the mind. And while technology is very good at satisfying the deficiency needs in the modern times, it has not kept pace equally well with satisfying the growth needs. Sometimes it may even be reversed. A whole lot of technologies that actually do a wonderful job, extraordinary job of satisfying deficiency needs, in fact, may have a negative impact on the growth needs. Now this is something that may wish to remember. But anyhow, as we come to further discussion.

So now coming to what kind of technology might be up there in the horizon? What are India-centric expansion plans and growth and development and so on. This is a very nice report is called Technology Vision 2035. The last one was Technology Vision 2020, which was championed and steered by none other than Dr. Abdul Kalam. Some of those stuff has come true, some of it has not come true. And this is about the future; predictions are very hard, especially about the future. But anyhow, this is a good starting point, which actually tells us where are we going in terms of technology where we need to go where we are. There are also sectoral reports related to transport, health, energy, water, and all of those things. So if we have a little bit more interest, depending on the area in which I work, it would be worthwhile to spend a few hours with these reports. Okay, now looking at the future, our best way to predict the future is to invent it. And we have learned that in lessons of COVID-19. About problem solving, about being interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, whole lot of actually I hear it all the time. Of course, I heard it 20 years ago as well, of course, that our structures and processes and universities, IITs, anywhere --- they are not very friendly in terms of being multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary beyond-disciplinary, out-of-disciplinary, transdisciplinary whatever we may call it, even today, if I wanted to hire a chemical engineer in Physics Department, it would be 200% impossible to do that. But anyway, forget about that particular aspect. More of it is happening, I have no doubt and more of it would happen because of the demands of problem solving.

Now, of course, we have fragmented knowledge, scientific knowledge in thousands of different ways, and these fragments were necessary in order to have growth in a specialized sector. It was also necessary for undergraduate teaching to give an identity so that identity qualifies one for a particular job. But if we were to move to higher education, starting from PhD and beyond and research, to my mind all of science technology, whatever we call it can be divided into five M's of doing business. The first one is Mechanics, which is our understanding of everything: how things have been why things happen, classical to quantum, from electronics to chemical to mechanical to what have you, Materials of course, and the rise of materials has been unprecedented; Machines: basically putting together the final thing: device, a system, a bundle, if you would, that would do the job. And of course, all of this would be meaningless without Manufacturing. So okay, manufacturing is a science, but paid very scant attention in all of this. While materials machines and mechanics are have found their place, manufacturing is still considered kind of low science and technology, which it is not so. And the final M is Man or woman for that matter, and what that means is that all of the science and technology is not a standalone activity; that this is not something which is done for its own sake, but is done for the fact that man has to be at the center, its needs and priorities are to be projected, and to be fulfilled in some way through science, technology and innovation. The next frontier of science, technology and innovation, a whole lot of it lies within nature-inspired science and technology, not just in materials, but in processing and tools, in fabrication and manufacturing, how it happens in nature completely different from manmade manufacturing; devices and machines, functions and mechanisms and indeed the principles and the wisdom by which everything is organized. So there is a whole lot of you know, goldmine out there, and really not even a tip of this iceberg has been seen or leveraged.

To give you an example about materials: where are materials going? Now we hear a lot about responsive materials, stimuli-responsive materials, functional materials, nanomaterials, smart materials, even intelligent materials, and all of that is true. But of course, the next wave of materials would lead to information embedded materials, knowledge embedded materials, which means that the materials are able to decide, based on stimuli and so on, about how to grow, how to shrink, how to divide, how to multiply, and what kind of functions would be appropriate. So this is something that I have copyrighted is saying "Is the next wave going to be conscious materials?" So that we are doing we are running seminars and conferences that are called ConMat? Would we have wise materials, would we even have spiritual materials, conscious materials, what have you. So this is, this is a fantastic area really to work in. But what is fantastic about this area is not just material but the convergence of materials with something larger than itself: bring it closer to how it happens in nature. Now, if we were to look at some simple functions in nature: very simple examples, we have structural colors, you know very vibrant colors in nature which are not duplicated by manmade colors. There are the self-cleaning water repellent surfaces like the lotus leaf, which also called Fakir droplets sometimes which means like a fakir, sitting on the bed of nails, and not really touching it. Even Buddha said long time ago to live in the world be like a lotus leaf, connected to muck, but growing so, beautifully and clean; low-temperature ceramics, all the man-made ceramics are made at extreme conditions of high pressure and temperature but look at ceramics which are made in nature; fantastic manufacturing pad bio-adhesion: look at the frogs and the gecko and insects that can modulate the strength of their adhesion and walk around forever, which means reversible, usable adhesion. Now, all of these things, they are, of course, a particular class very simple examples. And they are infinite such examples. In fact, the examples I've shown over here, there is no very good man-made material of this kind. And, in fact, these five examples, they don't depend on the chemical nature; the four examples, at least, they don't depend on the nature of the material, which may then depend on the chemistry and depends on the physics, which is very interesting, because the functionalities of color water, repellency adhesion, they all come from the micro- and nano-structures, which are present on the surfaces of these materials. So therefore, they can be replicated in any material, whether it's metal to polymers to anything else.

Where is manufacturing going? In manufacturing, of course, Industry 4.0 is the new mantra which is basically the convergence of communication, computing, and the machines and autonomous actions that happened in there. But another very compelling theme for manufacturing, is the distributed manufacturing, personal manufacturing, point-of-need manufacturing, nature-inspired manufacturing, and so on. A whole lot of that the first wave actually is coming in stabilized with 3D printing, and similar kinds of technologies. But they should become actually as pervasive as personal computing, for example, from personal computing, the personal manufacturing, is but a short step, and that step is going to happen. Now, I was very intrigued, I was very interested in what paths are talked about from a particular perspective about diversity. But if we were to look at nature, nature values diversity, this is one of the wisdoms of nature; it may tolerate sub-optimality but it would never tolerate lack of diversity. Now, why is that? Because things evolve in different circumstances, in different environments, and so on. If we were all clones of each other, no matter how optimal we are, the first virus COVID would have actually finished all of us simultaneously. So diversity is a framework, which is a bulwark against any changing circumstances, if you would, and is a robust framework. And so therefore, the diversity I'm so happy that India is such a diverse country, that the meaning of life actually is diversity, and it produces new opportunities, no doubt. And those are the opportunities that we need to fill with science and technology.

Now come back to the same picture again, I don't know why. But we talked about the efficiency needs and growth needs and it's very interesting, like I said, that technology more and more addresses that efficiency needs, which is good, no doubt. But we have made one fundamental mistake somewhere in the long march of science and technology. And that fundamental mistake is that we have said look if we satisfied the deficiency needs; in fact, even if we over satisfied the deficiency needs, in terms of let's say consumption and so on, then somehow the growth needs will be automatically taken care of. In other words, we said consumption equals happiness. This is a total misunderstanding. And this misunderstanding is actually of a very, very recent origin, maybe two centuries, perhaps no more. And this is something which gives us actually a new way of thinking about where we could get our science and technology moving in the future. So what is a fountainhead of future is basically clearly what the mind wants: to be healthy, to have quality of life to be connected with equality, or to learn and apply that learning to make decisions in complexity. And there's a reason that we get all these machine learning, neural technologies, neural nets, and what have you, to be entertained as a metaphor, even most of the meetings, you know, that we go to, they also have an entertainment component actually in there, you know, meetings that could be finished in five minutes, without a cup of tea, are actually extended for one hour, let us not forget the human aspect of the science and technology that we do, to have better life, to be happy, whatever that means, to find fulfillment, to create and control my own world. This is very important because a real world doesn't offer this luxury. Of course, through science and technology, we have gained control, a much greater control of the world surrounding us, then before. But even if you look at the rise of virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality, whole of that would actually become so much more pervasive in the decades to come. I'm afraid that some people would start living in that reality totally, totally. I know so many teenagers, even me, I was hooked on to actually a video game. And I'm not very, you know, proud of it, but I would be playing it until 3 am in the morning, just totally ignoring the next class at 8 am in the morning. So there are certain things in the mind which hook on to the world that we create and control and fight with, to live long, maybe forever. And, of course, as we said, happiness does not equal consumption; it doesn't even equal all the technology that we can marshal to satisfy our deficiency needs. Okay, I would skip that, because we are already running a little bit late. But actually to understand how science and technology evolved and where it is going, we have to look at actually, the evolution of different kinds of industry is starting from Industry 0, which is controlled by the flow of muscle to things which are controlled by a centralized industry, controlled by flow of materials, energy machines, but 4.0 and beyond industry is largely controlled by flow, ownership and control of data, information, and knowledge, and greater integration of five M's of science and technology that I talked about.

Let's quickly talk about the overarching challenges. By overarching I mean, those which would be all pervasive, which means that they will impact every aspect of our life, from dating, to food, to what I think, what I should think, and so on, and how I live, how I basically lead my life. The first challenge (Challenge #1) is the rise of intelligent machines which today we can describe as the convergence between cyber and digital on one side, and physical on the other. In other words, the convergence of materials, machines, communication, perception, through sensors, computing at the edge distributed computing, making autonomous decisions through the tools of artificial intelligence, managing control actions and autonomous action through actuators. Add to that if you were to go into the next society and industry, it will also integrate the biological in this fold. A lot of this is already happening, either cyber-physical, getting into biological or biological getting into cyber-physical, all of that is happening. And this is such a fascinating topic on which you know, one can actually have conferences and talk about for nearly 10 hours or 100 hours for that matter. So all of these are happening, Internet-of-Things, robotics, cobotics, quantum technologies by many different names that they are known. Okay, why is it overarching, it is overarching because of the convergence of different streams of knowledge coming around seamlessly, and they impact learning to skills, to education, to work, to governance, to our experience and entertainment, our health, judiciary, law, commerce, medicine, privacy, or our concepts of privacy and governance undergoing huge tectonic changes; safety, media, equality and justice, or the lack of them.

Challenge #2, again, an overarching challenge, which is called Sustainable Development. Is it an oxymoron? Certainly the way we view development today, and the way view, we view sustainability, sustainable development together, they are pulling into different directions. It is an oxymoron. We can think about can we actually solve the problem of sustainable development by science and technology alone? While you know, an optimist would probably say that, a realist actually would say no, because it's got many different pillars. Science, and technology certainly are a necessary pillar of that. But on top of that, it is the wisdom and the will of society that matters. Why do I say that? Because you see technology when it addresses sustainability, it is sustainability per GDP. And what that means is I would reduce emissions per GDP by having a more efficient technology. But I would not be able to reduce emissions because the total consumption is increasing. Absolutely. No doubt about that. Okay, so there are sustainable development goals, we know 17 of them, and we can connect each sub-goal with a particular branch or particular problem of science and technology, and innovation. And this is all about problem-solving; it's saying, look, how do we move from being tool centric to being problem-centric. I would just like to bring in little bit human touch into, you know, this whole problem of science and technology, and innovation. So I'm very fond of quoting this, that I encountered by chance, "I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science, we could address those problems, but I was wrong. The top problems are selfishness, greed and apathy. And to deal with those, we need a cultural transformation..." at the deepest seed of consciousness, if I may add, "... and we scientists don't know how to do that." By the way, what he's saying about scientists is true for every section of society. So that's where we are on that.

Challenge #3 is Lost-in-Translation Syndrome. So a whole lot of our science and technology is actually confined to what we might call labs, and so on, to certain groups, which read each other's papers in highly specialized journals, all of which is necessary for the growth of knowledge. But the whole point is, is there a balance between invention and innovation? Is there a balance between creation of knowledge and dissemination of that knowledge, transmission of that knowledge to all the stakeholders that can benefit by it? You see, here I have a camera which is a smart camera which is driven by machine learning so it keeps pulling me out of the time, no matter if I want to do it or not. This is related it to lights and shadows of technology all the time, so while we focus tightly on the lights of a technology, we forget the nexus and life cycle, and the interaction with the proximal technologies, which may produce huge shadows in the long run.

Challenge #4 is therefore innovation; it is about completing the circle of knowledge. Now, just like everything should be sustainable, physical things should be sustainable, the knowledge also has to be sustainable in the society. And there are two parts of that knowledge ecosystem for it to be sustainable that have to act in harmony and balance. These two parts are invention, discovery on one hand, and innovation on the other. Now, a whole lot of people I meet, about more than 70% scientists themselves, students and so on, don't understand the meaning of innovation. So I will just very quickly go through it. Invention is about producing new knowledge; it's about also part of that is diffusing and disseminating that knowledge. Essentially, invention is what we do as scientist and R&D labs, in universities, IITs, what have you. It requires resources; it requires budget; it requires money. It requires all of that to produce knowledge and to transmit that knowledge. That's invention and discovery. Innovation is 180 degrees opposite of that; it is mathematically orthogonal to invention, but it completes the circle of knowledge. The input is knowledge and why comes out from this black box called innovation, or the new socio economic opportunities, in other words growth. So, invention requires resources producing knowledge, whereas innovation takes that knowledge and convert it into new opportunities. So therefore, these two things working together, as a liberal metaphor, I could say Saraswati and Lakshmi working together, by having a respect and understanding of each other's goals, is basically what completes the goals of the society. Okay, so I know that we are running short on time; there are a whole lot of things happening in the innovation space, and people have much better opportunities and understanding of what you can take forward there. Again, because there's not enough time to have a deep analysis of actually where we fail in innovation, how we fail in innovation, and so on, any of you have interest in startups and innovation, please drop me an email, I'll be very happy to share, actually all the insights regarding this, and where are we moving in it; what are the opportunities and threats. Overarching Challenge #4 in science and technology and innovation is about inclusion, diversity, demography, globalization and poverty, the young and restless --- how do they get engaged? Now, of course, diversity and inclusion, gender is one aspect of it, which is a 50% aspect of it. I've never seen a very good bicycle which doesn't run on two wheels; maybe only in circus bicycles run on one wheel. But of course, diversity and inclusion and equity are also equally about the socio-economic background, it's about geography; it's about gender, it's about education, it's about language, it's about what have you. So it is basically an empowering the science and technology ecosystem of the future. All of these muscles have to be included, and empowered so that they bring in different perspectives, they bring in different ideas, they bring in basically greater participation of all the stakeholders. Often I have seen men, they think that, well, if there were more women in all of this, and all these people, that there would be less opportunities for men. That's such a silly idea that I don't even have to counter it. Because as you have more empowered people in the system, the basket, the size of basket also goes up. So therefore the opportunities that we work with, they also enlarge, in the same proportion.

Okay, the final challenge that I call the ‘last great frontier’ is not the space it is mind. The Challenge #5 is, very soon, increasingly, we will ask, what differentiates humans from machines, and of course, manual tasks, cognitive tasks, creative tasks, pattern recognition, in all of these machines are vastly superior, and they are catching up, even in creative tasks. I have seen the art that that artificial intelligence tools create. I've seen the poems, even the novels. I can guarantee you that within 20 years, it's not only about beating the World Chess Champions, there is no hope there at all, but any kind of pattern recognition, in other words, doing all sorts of science, which is based on pattern recognition, whether it's a discovery, whether it is material science, whether it is fluid mechanics, whether it is finding the options, the best decisions, best governance --- all of them would actually have financial markets trading, all of that is going to be outsourced to machines. So the last great frontier, if you were to my mind, is a science and technology of brain consciousness, happiness and fulfillment. Why can't we have science and technology of happiness? I mean, after all, all these technology tools that we are working with, they must have an objective. What is the overarching objective? If you were to ask me or anybody else for that matter, is of course, fulfillment and happiness. So why don't we cut the chase? And we say, look, let us get down to what this is all about what the existence is all about. And of course, how do we understand things not clear to me, the final frontier the big questions in which there is going to be a lot more of science and technology investment in the decades to come and centuries to come, in fact is a riddles of existence, perception; perception is not a simple thing is not purely mechanical, brain, mind awareness, consciousness, self-consciousness, and so on, and the connectedness of everything. Look, every time I do what is called a free body diagram in physics, I had some kind of suspicion, unsatisfied query, or a puzzle. And I said is it really true that I can predict actually when I drop a ball, as to when is going to hit the floor, and how high it would jump? Certainly, assuming the rest of the universe remained static.

So, preparing the ground for the science and technology of the future, is basically shift from tool-centric to problem-centric, emphasis on integration and synthesis, and not only on analysis, on creativity connecting the dots, even scientific common sense and intuition. And it's all about the convergence and co-arising. It's about understanding and negotiating the change, which is very interesting. We saw it in COVID-19 times. Interesting thing about negotiating and understanding change is basically that the human mind changes slowly, linearly changes with a small slow, whereas technology could be a little bit different. So technology could be disruptive, exponential and rapid. So whole problem is, how does society and individual mind actually negotiate change? And then, of course, going from invention to innovation, and so on. So a “brief history of the future” is about convergence. It is about understanding the deep drivers and directions of science and technology, which lay in understanding minds, needs, demands, wants, desires, and greed. These demands cannot be fulfilled with technology alone; it needs a balancing act. There are lights and shadows of technology. Technology is a good servant, but it will take increasingly take control. That's one part. The second part is that humans will willingly and happily relinquish more and more of that control, because of the so-called efficiency and lethargy. So it is time to focus on the higher needs through science and technology. If I were to say yoga and meditation, a lot of people say why I'm talking pseudoscience, what I'm talking about, and so on. Okay, well, okay, you'll be the judge. But anyhow, you see, no body of knowledge is ever static. And if we were to have growing science and technology, which means evidence-based logic and so on, data-based stuff, figuring out things, scientific temper, this cannot be limited only to what we consider to be science and technology. It would not solve our deeper problems that we deliver actually for individuals and for society that we want to see in the future centuries, the life on planet Earth.

So this is my take-home message that quality science, profound science, science with direction and relevance, and the translation of that science, science that is reaching different stakeholders of it. Now, I'm not saying that the same scientist and same person is responsible for all of these. No, certainly not. Certainly not. The point is: do we have an ecosystem that is able to cater to different functionalities that we want from our science and technology, and do the work actually together to make it all possible? Thank you very much. I will stop here. That's my last slide about science life and everything else. Thank you.

Watch the full video at https://youtu.be/Z-YlyJiWLQE

National Science Day 2022: Invited Talk 'From Raman Effect to Nuclear Power'

Dr. R. Chidambaram

News & Views

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Keywords: technology, reactors, Raman, nuclear energy, closed fuel cycle, multidisciplinary, knowledge economy, uranium, thorium, coherent synergy, equal partners

Professor Santanu Choudhury, Professor Sameer Brahmachari, Professor Partha Majumder, and Professor Ashutosh Sharma and others if they are there. First I must thank Prof Santanu Choudhury or really compliment him for organizing this excellent program on India's Journey from Aspirations to Achievements in the scientific field. So I've chosen the title as From Raman effect to Nuclear Power. And of course, it happens also to be the National Science Day. You know, we celebrate four days in science and technology. February 28, the day of the discovery of the Raman effect was announced by him because Raman undoubtedly was the greatest experimental physicist India has produced. Mathematics Day, December 22, the birthday of Srinivas Ramanujan. I'll mention him again, Ramanujan the natural magical genius as he has been called. Engineers’ Day, September 15, the birthday of M. Visvesvaraya the greatest engineer, civil engineer, India has produced, and Technology Day, May 11, the first day of the 1998 Pokhran test.

See when Raman got the Nobel Prize, and this is from Vigyan Prasaar Science photo. When the Nobel award was announced, he says, "I saw it as a personal triumph, an achievement for me and my collaborators, but when I sat in that crowded Hall in Sweden, and saw the sea of western faces surrounding me, and I the only Indian in my turban and closed coat, it dawned on me that I was really representing my people and my country. I truly felt humbled when I received the prize from King Gustav. Then I turned around and saw the British Union Jack, under which I had been sitting, and it was then that I realized that my poor country India did not even have a flag of her own -- and it was this that triggered off my complete breakdown". I've seen Raman when I was a student in the Indian Institute of Science. He was a very strong person, and he's talking about his emotional breakdown. Today 74 years after Independence, the young people particularly and also the older people, have huge opportunities to contribute to India's development in the future. You know, in this biography of Chandrasekhar, written by Kameshwar Wali, Wali he asked Chandrasekhar, “how did India produce world class scientists like Raman and Bose in 1920s?” And Chandrasekhar’s reply was that in the 20s, there was a need for self-expression as a part of the national movement, to show the West that in their own realms we were equal to them. Some of you might have seen this comment by Sommerfeld on Raman that when he announced the discovery of the Raman effect, Sommerfeld said "India had suddenly emerged in competitive research as an equal partner with our European and American sisters".

Today, the motivation, particularly aspirations, particularly for the young people, it should be to make India a developed country, in the fullest sense of the term, and also a Knowledge Economy. Developed country in an economic sense, and Knowledge economy in the sense of developing new knowledge and the ability to appropriate knowledge generated anywhere in the world. Bhabha --- you know, Arthur Koestler talks of two kinds of leaders, the Yogi and the Commissar. Yogi is the contemplative thinker and Commissar is a man of action. Most of us are a mixture of this, part this and part that. Look at Homi Jehangir Bhabha, you know, a unique mixture of both. At one time I was joking that he seems to be 100%, Yogi, and 100% Commissar which of course, arithmetically is absurd. See many leaders when they pass away, the whole system they have created collapses. Look at Bhabha who died tragically in the air crash. Nothing happened really; of course, we lost a great man who would have done much more for atomic energy, but he had created a leadership swarm around him and so the Atomic Energy Program continued to flourish. Bhabha was a renowned theoretical high-energy physicist, pioneering work in Cambridge on electron positron scattering now known as Bhabha Scattering. But then, the other side of Bhabha, that he led to the development of a nuclear energy program. He thought of building nuclear reactors indigenously at a time when we were not even building bicycles indigenously. Bhabha was universally respected around the world --- founder member of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and he was the President of the first Geneva Conference on the peaceful uses of the atomic energy in 1955.

The Great Srinivasa Ramanujan, this is from the Biography of Ramanujan by K Srinivas Rao, from the earlier biography, The Man Who Knew Infinity, you will see that his famous notebooks, 100 notebooks 4000 theorems, and either they were very obvious to him, the proofs, or he didn't think it necessary but he gave them without any proof. And as the Cambridge mathematician Professor Hardy says, wonder with awe and admiration that these notebooks there are no mistakes at all. Now, the fact that he did not write down the proofs turned out to be a boon to generations of great mathematicians, like George Andrews, who discovered one of the last notebooks and they could find problems, the theorem came from Ramanujan's notebooks, and they worked out the proof of that and enormous amount of research was carried out on that basis. Of course, the new applications of Ramanujan's work were in cryptography and encoding theory, and I don't think he ever thought that these applications will emerge from his fundamental work in mathematics. As Nobel laureate Chandrasekhar says, "As long as people do mathematics, the work of Ramanujan will continue to be appreciated". Maybe I'll mention it again later, artificial intelligence, and robotics is a part of intelligence, and there are some people who are scared. Even Stephen Hawking was scared that if they go on increasing the intelligence of the robots, then one day we may have super intelligent robots, AI systems which may take over the world. I don't agree. But I agree with Roger Penrose, who says that no algorithm or cybernetic machine created by man can be smarter than man himself. Raman was this example, and the reviewer of book, Yehezkel Dror from Hebrew University, says "no enhancements of human intelligence", meaning that artificial intelligence "opens the door to becoming a Ramanujan and no algorithm is likely to produce robots with the abilities of Ramanujan".

Coming to nuclear energy, India has developed in so many fields, but I will spend some time on nuclear energy. The Director General of IAEA International Atomic Energy Agency when he visited the BARC, he said "I would like to conclude by noting that India's remarkable success in the field of peaceful nuclear technology is an inspiration for many developing countries." You have a large number of reactors working now, and I've always said if you have a complex system, technical system, safety and reliability go together. In your own car, if the brake and the clutch and the steering don't give you trouble likely it is very safe; you will not get involved in any accident. Same thing for any complex system, including nuclear reactors. If they work for a long time without giving you problems, then they are very safe systems. See, on December 10, 2018 indigenously-built unit of Kaiga, pressurized heavy water reactor in Karnataka, broke the world record for continuous operation --- 941 days, which was built, till then held by... of course they broke the record when they crossed 851 days. They should have been 52 days, then they had to shut it down 941 days; it was shut down. Because we are all worried about climate change; everybody's worried about climate change: global warming and carbon dioxide emission. Carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases, goes and settles upstairs; traps the infrared radiation trying to get out to the earth, and this is what causes global warming. Already more than 1° warming has taken place, and everybody has agreed that we can't allow it to go more than 2 degrees. From 1°, one more degree is left; actually they say better you control it at 1.5 degrees. And this International Panel on Climate Change says that key measures to achieve mitigation goals include development of renewable energy, nuclear and carbon capture and storage. For next 20-30 years, we are going to burn coal. That's why when I was a PSA, we started this program on the Advanced Ultra Supercritical Thermal Plant, where you raise the steam to 700°C+, then for the same amount of carbon dioxide, or the same amount of power that you produce, you emit less carbon dioxide. Because global warming in the short run has lead, ofcourse the northern hemisphere Norway and Sweden and Siberian people are very happy with global warming, but tropical countries are first affected as says a Stanford studies, dragging down economic growth in warm countries such as India and Nigeria. But in the long term, everybody is going to be is going to be affected.

This is India's three-stage program, plan produced during the time of Homi Bhabha and his colleagues: (i) first heavy-water reactors as most of our reactors are, make plutonium out of Uranium 238, (ii) free water reactors isotope Uranium-235 burns, undergoes fission. 238 which is most of it 99%+, part of it gets converted to plutonium, and plutonium is very good for fast breeders. It's called fast because they use fast neutrons; breeders it’s called because it produces more nuclear fuel than it consumes. And then you've got a huge resource of thorium. Thorium will be, kind of, exposed to the neutrons, fast neutrons, in these breeders and they get converted to Uranium-233 and hopefully in the long term, third stage, we will we will get into the Uranium 233--Thorium 232 cycle. Of course we can have additionalities of light water reactor. We don't have much experience in that excepting our nuclear submarine. We are all about, as I showed you, the three stages, closing the nuclear fuel cycle. Open cycle means you just take the spent fuel, throw it away as waste, which is absurd because it contains so much of valuable nuclear resource. So, in this paper we wrote, myself, Sinha, and Patwardhan, 2007 --- we have shown that if you do that, at some stage total power that you can get from available global nuclear fuel resources will come down and then it will go down. On the other hand, if you close the cycle through Plutonium-Uranium 233, then it becomes Sustainable Mitigation Technology. That's what India is planning. And of course, we take care of the environment. As you can see here the beautiful environment around one of our reactors. Because all reactors are like that only. And these are the projects under construction; more have been sanctioned by the government.

Artificial intelligence-based or machine learning-based expert systems have been implemented in the Indian nuclear power plants. Decision support systems, system-based intervention guideline management system, and then false-alarm suppression, prognostics of plant equipment, robotics (robotics is a part of artificial intelligence) for surveillance and safeguards. Of course, the final decision in any reactor is not allowed to be taken by a machine; that's taken by the operator of the nuclear power plant, but all this data becomes available. These are the new projects which have been sanctioned --- ten 700 MW reactors and also these Russian Light Water Reactors. One day we hope we will also be able to indigenize this lightwater reactor technology like we did with CANDU type of reactors to 20 MW, imported first from Canada and then we have taken it up to up to 700 MW in between 540 MW --- they're all totally indigenous designs. See once I and the former Director General IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, were talking and I told him that if you close the nuclear fuel cycle as I explained to you with Plutonium, the same Uranium will give you 50 times more power or even more. But if you close it using also Thorium --- go into the Thorium-Uranium 233 cycles --- you can draw perhaps 600 times more power from the same quantity of uranium and that the slide I showed you. So, the use of closed nuclear fuel cycle with Thorium-233 added --- in fact, he asked me can we then say nuclear energy then becomes renewable energy; I said let us be a little modest: we'll say 'near-renewable' energy. Ofcourse there is also plenty of free hydrogen and uranium in seawater.

Nuclear is not just nuclear electricity or nuclear weapon that is practically no field of activity, societal activity, from which nuclear is absent. You can see in food preservation if we are able to kill the bacteria, shelf life goes up. You package and then expose it to radiation. Same thing with medical supplies, experiments, of are limited to those which can be given this kind of treatment. Then there is the Bhabhatron for radiation treatment of cancer using gamma radiation. Water resources, you can check using these techniques I've also done under the RuTAG in Uttarakhand, and so many other possibilities are there in gamma radiation for industrial safety, and so on, radiography of course. Today advanced technologies are multidisciplinary. All disciplines are getting multidisciplinary --- physics, chemistry and biology very difficult. I was mentioning about physics, chemistry, and biology -- where is the boundary now? In fact, if we take density function, as I may mention a little later, the theoretical chemists use it as much as theoretical condensed matter physicists, look at the Nobel Prize for Venky Ramakrishnan. The Nobel Prize was in Chemistry, the structure he solved was the ribosome, which is of course a biological material, techniques he has used are physical techniques. Same thing is true for technologies to build a nuclear power plant or space launch vehicle or advanced fighter aircraft, in mission-oriented agency, they are not one technology -- there are multidisciplinary, disciplines are involved. And of course, they are all within the same institution. When I started this program on the advanced ultra-supercritical thermal plant, then we had to bring in three organizations who could do that. They were BHEL, who are designers of power engineering equipment, NTPC, were, of course, the utility, and for some major materials problem, we brought in IGCAR who are experts in materials because they can do it fast beta reactors, no problem for them to do it for advanced Ultra supercritical thermal plant. World over, giant science and technology projects also involve several countries and India, in many of them, as an equal partner. I remember from the Board of Governors '94-95 at the International Atomic Energy Agency, one western member in the meeting said that the developed countries are suffering from donor fatigue. That is when I developed this phrase "equal partner"; I want to collaborate in science and technology project but as equal partner.

Really nice author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, some of you might have read his book, The Black Swan. Black Swan is an unusual event --- you expect the swan to be white; black swan means unusual event, but with serious consequences. Then he developed this phrase "anti-fragile". You see, if something is robust, it will be resistant to shocks. No change. But if it is fragile, it will break down. But he coined the phrase anti-fragile as under stress it will become better and better. There are bacteria for example, even probably COVID so that drug-resistant bacteria or even antibiotics we talk about, anti-microbes, antibiotic resistance; these is also I have said of of our nuclear program.

Of course, technology denials in the earlier stages -- you have resisted and overcome the shocks of that. I remember when I was Director BARC I defined self-reliance, not as trying to do everything yourself, doesn't make any sense to me. It's a complex system all over the world, we buy subsystems from outside. But if anything is denied to you, including the proverbial wheel, you must have the capability to do it yourself. That's why I defined Self Reliance as "immunity against technology denial". Today we are strong enough, very strong, getting stronger. We should learn to leverage international cooperation. We're doing it already to strengthen our own our own initiative. Before I go to the next slide, let me make a brief mention of Pokhran. Pokhran was a total indigenous effort. Of course was we had major support from one of the DRDO labs. Most of the work is BARC’s Terminal Ballistics Research Lab. Then we had to design explosive lenses. The initiative came but look at the physics of it. How many disciplines are involved --- shockwave physics, condensed matter physics, material science, nuclear neutron physics, radiation hydrodynamics, if you're building and radiation matter interaction physics, you're building a thermonuclear device and then advanced electronics and control systems in fabrication and processing acknowledges over a wide range. And that's why all this led us for an accurate prediction of the weapon yields. But there were limitations with the shaft that we had available, the maximum we could test but what 45 kilotons, but all the physics principles have been tested. That's why I wrote in this paper in 2008, that a carefully planned series of tests carried out by us, gave us the capability to design confidently and build nuclear weapons up to 200 kilotons. Of course, a lot of work has been since done.

See this Venn diagram of sharing of nuclear weapons knowledge. And as everyone knows, there was sharing between US, UK and France. France gave it to Israel, to Israel, probably to South Africa, Russia to China, China to Pakistan, but they all realize that India stands alone. That means, we did no spying, and since all capabilities exist within our organization, there was us no need to seek the help of anybody. Of course, as I said, we are one we go for international coop on equal partner basis. We have the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, which we saw the Higgs Boson. You know, in this what happens is that protons are going around in 26-kilometre circumference circles, two of them, two orbits opposite direction, once in a while they are brought together. And when they are brought together, energy disappears, and you have the good old Einstein equation backwards. When mass disappears to get energy, that's how we get nuclear fission or fusion. But if energy disappears, you have to produce new particles. And we had to accelerate it to several tera-eV before we got the Higgs Boson. And we contributed all the sextupole, octople, and decapole superconducting corrector magnets, 1800 of them to this to this orbit. The charged particle proton is bent by dipole magnets, then it is corrected by these corrector magnets. In the (ITER) International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, our collaborators on the Indian side is Institute of Plasma Research. As you can see, one of the main things they are contributing is this largest cryostat built in the world, being built by L&T Hazira. The base has already been installed last year and I'm sure that things will happen very fast.

See, Centers of Nanoelectronics shall come up as part of India achievements. I remember a meeting which Arun Shourie was chairing. I said that we missed the microelectronics revolution; we shouldn't miss the Nanoelectronics. Shourie spoke after me and said "If the PSA says we shouldn't miss... I'm asking him what is he doing about it?" So I told him give me 100 crores, I will fund two Centers of Excellence at the best possible places --- that was Institute of Science and IIT Bombay, and they have become, as you can see, I don't want to go into more details, how many papers have come, projects, and how much international, and both of them are among the best centers of nanoelectronics in the world. We also have the Indian National Knowledge Network (NKN): it is connecting 1600 knowledge institutions in the country. It is a Research and Education Network, and it is already connected to the CERN Grid, the European Union grid, the Internet 2 grid of the United States and it is very good for collaboration, both nationally and with outside international experts. Cyber security becomes the most important, one of the most important things, today. The moment you have data moving from one place to another, it can be hacked and they are also getting smarter. While the cyber defenders are getting smart, they are also learning to use AI and ML. And of course, we have many institutions working on this, the NTRO National Technical Research Organization, SETs, the PSA's Office and National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection is part of NIC. National nodal agency SETS is working in the frontline, in Chennai, funded by the PSAs office, blockchain quantum cryptography, also post-quantum cryptography and all these and we have prepared a report. SETS has prepared a report under the chairmanship of Ravindra Balaraman, IIT Madras, and what we should be doing in this artificial intelligence for cybersecurity and also cybersecurity for artificial intelligence. Data security is very important, I got this slide from a young mathematics professor in IIT Jodhpur and he tells there are three ways as I requested him for the slide. Encryption, we all know, but you can also do fingerprinting and watermarking, and all these are now possible for getting data security.

See, this is the chain: research-development-delivery. Research, you create knowledge, develop it and then you have to deliver. If you want to deliver it to industry, then the development phase has to be strengthened. In case of rural development, the delivery phase has to be strengthened. The academia--industry interface we need to strengthen and it is specific to each technology we had created, for example, machine tools, and IIT Madras has created, under Professor Ramesh Babu, from the Mechanical Engineering Department, the world's best grinding machine tool. And in rural technology, we have a number of programs, like the RuTAG, which is centered in 7 IITs, and is an Open Platform Innovation strategy --- does both technology transfer, what Harvard Business School calls knowledge brokering. What the Harvard Business School guys say, all innovations are new --- old innovations packaged for a new environment. And we can do that for rural development and of course, scaling of innovations. I've been very much interested in this, because I've noted that for a person near the poverty line, the quality of his/her life is a very nonlinear function of his/her income. But if you double my salary, my quality of life doesn't change; what changes possibly is my bank account.

India of our Dreams, coming to the end of my talk, is an India which is economically developed, that the human development index is high, and India to be scientifically advanced with a knowledge economy, the ability to generate new knowledge, and appropriate knowledge generated anywhere in the world, and an excellent RDI ecosystem. Excellence in basic research including what I have called directed basic research, excellence in applied research, technology development, R&D-led innovation, and of course, all this has to be backed by high-quality manufacturing skills. We also want an India which is militarily strong. Of course, some sections have mentioned India is already very highly developed, and we should have an appetite for risk-taking. Phil Rosenzweig, in his book, This Idea is Brilliant, edited by John Brockman, says, "when it comes to technology breakthrough or launching new products, better to act and fail, than to fail to act." If you're afraid of venturing into new technology and want only proven technologies, and proven technology is a synonym for obsolete technologies, you will have to learn to take risk, and if you want to be a leader, and that surely the young people want to be leaders. And Nobel laureate, Abhijit Banerjee, also says poor people take up low-risk low-return projects, because they fear the risk, so they remain poor. The same thing is true for research and to be present in the frontiers of science and technology, we need "coherence synergy" in our S&T activities. Synergy is always there in our activities, but coherence involves, among other things, space-time relationship, develop it at the right time, so that India gets maximum benefit out of it. Knowledge-Economy, which we all want India to be, needs both a technology superstructure, but you can't build the technology superstructure without the foundation of higher education and basic research. And India should have, this is what I've said before, India should have the ambition to be the first introducer of new technologies, advanced technology after of course, due diligence. Take care of their techno-economic viability, assurance about their safety and so on. And it's correctly worth repeating what I said before, the so-called proven technologies, unless subjected to continuous evolutionary improvements are often a synonym for obsolete technology. So I think I will stop here. Thank you very much.

Watch the full video at https://youtu.be/er-uHNyooDQ

National Science Day 2022: Invited Talk 'Proud to be a Player and Spectator of Post-Independent India's Scientific Journey'

Prof. Samir Brahmachari

News & Views

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I thank Shantanu, Director of IITJ, for suggesting to give this talk during my social visit to Calcutta. I am also thankful to CG CRI director and CSI lab from where I'm speaking because I was worried that I may not be able to speak, as I have no good connectivity at home.

I'm not here to praise Indian Science, nor I'm here to say how great India was 4000 years back of civilization, that we gave the world zero. Nor I'm going to say and talk about how India solved all the problems of the world of imagination, of thinking, how we could think of a Pushpak viman or mythological characters giving credit to that. We actually thought of all this. I'm here to tell you that in post-independent India how did we do well, and whether did we do good at all. As in my title, I've said I am proud to be a player and a spectator. I'm very proud that I was born in independent India. I have that advantage. And as Dr Chidambaram mentioned, when CV Raman got his Nobel Prize, he realized that he was not an Indian. So they were all subjects to the British Raj. We had extraordinary theoretical scientists. SN Bose, then we had Ramanujan, Mehnad Saha, JC Bose, and then experimental scientists, PC Ray, JC Bose. So, sometimes I felt I wish I was born 50 years before in Bengal, not in the 50s in Bengal because then I would have had wonderful colleagues of these brilliant minds to interact with. And also, you know, imagine the Tagore, the philosophy, the Vivekananda you know, every possible ideological great leader were there. We also discovered malarial parasites. In Calcutta, we discovered cholera toxin by SN Dey. All these happened very early in India. And when we were still not independent, cholera proxy was a little later than that.

Now my question is, wherever I give a talk, young people ask me, why don’t we have Nobel Prize in India since CV Raman? So technically, I'll say the nation was very poor, which to visualize what was India in 1950s. So I'm lucky that although I did not grow up in Maharashtra or Tamilnadu, in South India, I had the great opportunity of interacting with institutions, like Professor G N Ramachandran, C.N.R Rao several people M.M. Sharma, Govind Swaroop, R. A. Mashelkar. So, lots of leaders of Maharashtra and South India actually made a difference. So, I asked myself a question, how could these people especially GNR or Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar could imagine building institutions or do the science of global nature in a country whose life expectancy was 32 in Independence, poverty was everywhere. We did not make even a cycle or a pin. So, what I want to tell you is if you look at India as a very poor country in the 1950s. In the 70s, we became a little moderately developing country. By the 90s, we became an aspirational nation, and by 2022 or 2020 we are as good as anybody else in the world at doing things. Now, question is, did science and technology play a role? And if so, what is that I saw as a spectator and when I could play my own role in this journey

If you look back historically, the Institute of Science was built not by the British, but by the then Tata, JN Tata as an unborn child and that's how it was embarrassing for the British to accept to be science. So, science was not a culture promoted by British rule in 1900, in India, it was the Maharaja of Mysore who gave the land and is the money that at the money he gave, and the British had to back, so, you can see in the Institute of Science could be one of the earliest birth and then came JC Bose Institute, a smaller institution. If you really historically look at we did not pursue science in pre-independent India, as a collective endeavor when the world was awakening and doing this in Europe, America, big structures and activities. We were a poor nation. In 1942, as a war effort, the DSIR was born with a mega 10 lakh rupees deposit. So, they had an annual expenditure. And it is only 1947 due to the persuasion of Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar this was converted to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and DSIR was dissolved. I had the privilege of reading early documents of how it was imagined and what was done. So sometimes I realized when somebody asked me why there was no buildable price, I said the first priority was the nation needed to do something for the people of our country. So entire institutions, even the institute, I'm sitting today, glass and ceramic were built with a purpose. We had to import porcelain, toilet, sink, everything. How do we make ourselves so whether it was National Metallurgical Laboratory, National Chemical Laboratory, Glass and Ceramic Laboratory, all these Institute first 14 were built by Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar, in a small period of about nine years, at an extraordinary speed, that is linked to the industry in the beginning. So Indian science, when I look at the best mind of India, of our students who came in the 50s, there was a pride to do science. I'm sure that Chidambaram will agree with the clarion call of the nation to bring young people to do science, not only allowed some Indians to go abroad, well thousand of Indians to go abroad, to learn, practice science and come back. And these are the best minds in India. They were asked to build this nation. And these are the people who built the institutions, which are the present where our young generation has grown. And I'm also privileged to be part of that. So, therefore, salute those who took the challenge to bring food to the hungry, and get Amul baby food to every child of this. How did we happen? Just imagine we have got independence we have to start our election process. And then Nehru realized that we have to import the ink to do the voting process. He goes to NPL and asks, Can we do it? And within a short period, the indelible ink was developed. And many of you will be surprised that even today CSIR earns royalty out of that indelible ink because many many democratic countries use this today. Even COVID time it was used to know who has to go to quarantine.

Then comes we had the buffalo's milk we had lot more buffalo than cows the world wanted us to import milk powder from Sweden to other places? Again, the government approached CFTRI, and I think Dr Subramaniam. And they say, Can we eat high-fat milk? Can we make milk powder using this high-fat milk, you had to imagine there were no refrigerators in most of our homes. So, therefore, fresh milk reaching the children was very difficult. So, therefore, it is CFTRI, that brought out the early days to create milk powder that became the famous AMUL milk powder. Because it was a different technology, when you handle high fat, make what I'm trying to say, in the 50s, nation's focus, to use it's the best mind not to make a discovery, but to find solutions to the problem that were challenging. So let's then start building institutions, we build IITs in 56, 76. And each was built with a hope that these are the people who are gifted, who will be lifted, and they will lift the rest. If you know about MIT, I'm addressing some of them I hope the students at IIT are listening to me. You know, I have gone to MIT, the route 128 of MIT is created technology. It's like if you take route 128 of MIT, around the technologies that have come out of MIT, the industry that has grown is its GDP may be larger than some countries. So how come when I go to IIT Kanpur or IIT Kharagpur the roads are down, people are so poor when 50,000 students over the years have gone up and down to the railway station, why they haven't solved. So, therefore, our premise is that we will lift, the gifted and gifted will lift the rest, this did not happen. So our first model failed, that we focused on institutions to build very ivory towers institutions, which actually got disconnected from the nation's needs. So we created, we were not lucky. Then came the 70s. We, I'm sure many of you were not born, but some of the younger some of the faculties were born by 70, who are there listening to me, the Bangladesh War, till that time, we are getting PL 480 wheat. And we were depending on American PL 486 or so the wheat will come and then hungry Indians will get food. We were still poor, we had to stand in the queue for kerosene, we didn't have enough milk until the Korean made a difference and we became the milk surplus. So you can see we were focused on institutions and individuals were focused to get solving the problems. It is like a lower-middle-class nation that cannot have a larger aspiration of doing science. Same time we have Govind Swaroop sitting in TIFR dreaming of building the largest radio telescopes in the world. I get amazed when I read this book on Space Life Matter. I actually get surprised that how the imagination of scientists like Govind Swaroop could actually think and dream. Imagine, Vikram Sarabhai thinking about India will be a space power. He hasn't seen it happen. But it has happened. So it is important today, not to be bogged down by what we don't have. But what we can have the aspiration and imagination was never bogged down by the economic status of this nation or the people. But the best mind has to work on it.

Now, if you look at the 1958 first science policy, it clearly states that scientists are the nation's asset. And by making scientists the national asset we know like there's no way, I can tell you I So, tell Dr. Bhargava, that those days if you go to a Times of India, matrimonial in the 60s, you will see the requirements that say Indian Foreign Service and scientists, you know why a good boy is potential foreign service and scientists because that time dollar had like value the scientists were the only other people than Indian Foreign Service, who could actually go abroad and bring some dollars because if you have a dollar you can buy that Bajaj Chetak scooter, you can get gas out of line, you can get a telephone number all these materialistic things you could get. So, scientists were of high value. In the 70s our nation was faced with one side Pokhran, we demonstrated our strength and on another side we just went to war and liberated Bangladesh. So, we had a severe sanction from the US, PL 480 was withdrawn. And the Nature wrote, that 10 million Indians will go hungry on the front page and then Mrs. Gandhi called scientists. So, again, you can see that leadership is an important component. So scientists cannot do it all by themselves. Their leadership had to have faith. The relationship between Nehru and Bhatnagar created so many institutions, this demand on scientists that we have to do some problem solving, we have to produce the food surplus. Five years later, it is the role of Swaminathan and team Indian Agricultural Research Institute played an important role. And five years later the same Nature writing “from begging bowl to breadbasket”. What did CSIR do at that time you know, we didn't have tractors we were importing tractors, so CMERI Durgapur was asked to build tractors and the tractor was called Swaraj. So Mrs Gandhi in the stream was given because t was told that we got Freedom from Hunger. And this freedom from hunger is the real swaraj, not the 1947 Independence alone. Same time we did pesticides, we needed catalysts to produce things and NCL was producing those. So if there was a glass barrier, the world was a controlling catalyst nobody can breakthrough. But then the national chemical laboratory of CSIR came up. So what I'm trying to say is in the 70s, we were denied supercomputers. I'm sure Chidambaram will remember IBM went away. When IBM went away we asked Coca-Cola to go then CFTRI came with Thums Up. So we have always been trying to solve problems. And that's how the PARAM that's how the Flosolver all these computers were built. And they actually allowed our space program Atomic Energy Program and even Atomic Energy supercomputer I think in Hyderabad, I forgot all this actually allowed what you enjoy today. When you watch an IPL the transponders have gone up. We feel secure because we are able to communicate, we can handle tsunamis we can handle typhoons. So you can see that Indian science post-independent till the 90s was busy solving problems. It is like the elder brother of a family whose parents are very poor. He cannot have aspirations and his job and role will be to say how the entire family can be protected. You can be the breadwinner and that is what Indian science did post-independence first 40-50 years. As I said, I wish our IITs created human resources. And we gave about trillion dollars of human resources to the United States and created Silicon Valley's support system. We are glad that people like Santanu are in this country. We have several people like Ashutosh Sharma in this country, many many people who are in this country. And that's what I say 10% of those people including Narayan Murthy is of India made what it is today. So we actually worked with 10% of us.

II often call Indian science an outcome of toned milk where the cream has been given away to Silicon Valley. Now, still, you can make good yogurt on tone well, you can still make a good lassi, and still, you can make good ice cream. So, therefore, my story is, that I was not lucky to have those associations with the great scientists of the past. But I was very lucky to land up with GN Ramachandran's laboratory in the 70s. When I met him, I had very little idea how big his contribution was. I again go back and imagine the 1950s, here is a young man 29 years old, who was a student of CV Raman goes to Madras. And he wants to solve the structure what is the situation we have on the College Track trip, where the alpha helix of hair structure has been solved. The fibrous protein with a double helix of the DNA it's been solved. And he is looking for a problem and he took up the largest protein in the body called collagen this triple helical structure. What an audacity that you have to build a random house generator you to build the generator yourself. Look at the comparison with Francis Crick and Watson they had the roads Rosalynn flanking already the X-ray from Brax laboratory. They had already the Chagas principle. GN Ramchandran had nothing. He had depended on CLRI-CSIR to get a torn tendon collagen and could take the diffraction which is very cool, I was lucky to work on them subsequently. And then he could predict every third residue had to be glycine from pure composition, and the triple helical structure was powdered. Look at the courage and imagination. Take the inspiration I tell to the young people look at this and take that. So I got the inspiration that nothing is a problem if you have the courage to challenge problems and pick up science. So I was lucky that I was given a research problem to solve, “how hydroxyproline stabilizes collagen”. And I was really glad to say I could figure out during my Ph.D. why scurvy disease happens and why hydroxylation of protein is important in collagen and how it imparts to scurvy. I take this pride to say to the young generation that in the 70s we could do that science and publish this paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. So you know, there is nothing that you cannot do if you do not aspire. I saw Chandra Shekhran and I'm sure Chidambaram will recall his courage to challenge the double-helical structure of right-handed Denix can it be left-handed? Yes, Alex's printout is crystal structure left-handed. So the courage to challenge the established paradigm, and then take it up and see whether you can create novelty in the work is what I learned as a spectator and as a small player. GNR's discoveries of the triple helical structure of collagen led to the discovery of the FiSi map, which became the hallmark even today's the hallmark of a protein crystal structure solution. I always wondered, what was the difference between Francis Crick and Watson versus G N Ramachandran and Chandraa Shekheran. So, I realized that Francis Crick and Watson were sitting in Cambridge surrounded by biologists. GNR and Shekharan were sitting in Madras and in Bangalore, not necessarily surrounded by colleagues and friends of biology. The structure of the double-helical structure of DNA will explain the hereditary and genetic transformation. Whereas Ramachandran did not say it has not escaped our notice that if every third residue of collagen, one glycine is replaced by another amino acid there will be a kinetic disorder. It's only when done on the transgenic mice and demonstrated that a single mutation in one glycine residue will completely destroy the structure of collagen. So, therefore, I learned it is important to work with biologists while you are, structural biology or physicist and you have to learn and eventually learn to work with geneticists. Now so, I had the privilege of working in a poor country in the 70s, then in developing countries in the 90s. So the question became, whether, whether if you look at the DNA structure, you realize, in Francis Crick in 1980, told and Crick and Orgel wrote a Nature paper and said that the old repetitive DNA is junk and junk DNA has no function and junk DNA any any effort to identify function of the junk DNA is not only futile but intellectually sterile. I was a young faculty at molecular biophysics unit, I read this paper, I was working on polypeptides and repetitive DNA structure. And I believe that it's structural variability of DNA on a sequence-dependent fashion as proposed by Shekharan and can only be experimentally proved, if one works on those regions of the genome. Both synthetic and natural. So what did I take? I thought, if this is true if Francis Crick and Orgel is true, then it's okay. I tried to work on it and didn't work. But if they're not true, then I will be breaking grounds and we can create a new field. And I'm glad to say that a lot many years of work 20 years of work, quite very 30 years of work with Dr. Mitali Mukherjee has written down in a article, that which our work on repetitive DNA actually led to the development of genetic tests neurological disorder. And in the 90s, we realized that repetitive DNA instability causes both cancers, as well as the winner DNA expansion, which could cause neurological disorders. And I'm very proud to say this work was taken from here all the way to Center for Biochemical Technology, which is known today as Institute of genomics and Integrative Biology. So what did I say that you don't have to be bogged down just because the tallest person so in the 80s. I heard Sydney Brenner and Sydney Brenner, in his talk, said the same thing, that don't get bogged down by a tall person saying something. He said even Francis Crick could not predict splicing, he said even in front of Francis Crick. So, therefore, you have never ever accept, what the dogma in biology continues to go ahead and do so. Can we do ordinary scientists to do extraordinary sites?

And my learning is from ISRO. As you know ISRO does not have a large number of IITs or brilliant MIT scientists, but a large number of Indian engineers and scientists who have done extraordinary jobs. And I'm sure if you have seen the movie Mangalyaan you will understand what an extraordinary job was done by space scientists to send and utilize the gravitational forces between the Earth and the Mars. So, you know, this sort of brilliant science is not was possible till the 90s. We were struggling to do science with limited resource solving our problems. In the 90s India became liberal and we opened up the economy my perception, is that the best mind of India suddenly realize that we should move to do things where we can earn more money. And it took away the India's success in Information Technology also took away a large number of scientists engineers who could have become a PhD and all away. So my learning from CSIR, I could see the number of people who retired as it's the who were IIT, IIT doctorate and CSIR scientists retiring. We did not get IIT doctorate coming in. I can tell you Gagan Pratap JEE topper, did Ph.D. in aerospace. But we didn't get a JEE topper to come you know, only JEE topper we have is Anurag Agarwal who was the CBSE topper. Actually lost best of us scientists potential who could affect Nobel Prize in the 90s to 2005. When our best when the infrastructure started better, when the investment was better when leadership of Chidambaran and so many people made sure that lot more money comes to the system. So, therefore, this is a dichotomy. We suddenly got lots of resources. We got computers, we got everything opened economy, we could import chemicals, everything happened. But suddenly we lost our best mind not coming to science. So this brought me to 2005. 2005, we created a large number of IISERs. And there was a huge expansion of IIT system. And my belief this attracted a very strong, brilliant students. So by the time I moved to Delhi and became aspirational to build genomics in this country, again, I'll show you an example. I think Dr Chidambaran will recall India made the first black and white television in CEERI Pilani, and ECI was the one who manufactured and put it into the prime minister's office. I looked at the note that the Planning Commission note which said there were proposal to make color television. And the idea was there is no future for color television in India and nobody will buy so we did not pursue it. But today, every home has a color television and made in Korea or Japan or in China. So our policy failure leads to scientists aspirational fall, and scientists gives up and goes away from the system. The same thing happened in solar energy. In 1970s, NPL was holding more patent and solar energy than many many developed world. Unfortunately, we did not think solar energy will be important. And it was not pursued. In 1995 genomics wasn't there. I was very fortunate to get to the part I saw in 85. I was in CAD Charles Qantas laboratory in the summer. And then the genomics was born, I could see that genomics will be the future. I was shocked to see how people were dreaming, dreaming of a project of $3 billion dollar when we could do hardly 200 nucleotides of DNA sequencing. We're talking about 3 billion nucleotides sequencing. This imagination was so large. I saw Andrew Jacob thinking of a chip of extra nucleotide, which will actually solve the sequencing. I saw it was Edwin Southern printing oligonucleotides on glass slides. I saw Charles Canter as ahead of the UAE genomics project. So I was very fortunate that I came across these brilliant people in late 80s. And I was elected to HUGO in 1990. I was really fortunate that I could HUGO decided that genomics genome should not become proprietary and lead to a Cold War. And the information should be shared. So the elected people across the world. And if I recall, correct, me and Dr. Naithani were the first two Indians to be inducted into HUGO. I was lucky. Charles Canter of America was the vice president. I was interacting with Canter. As a result, I have elected it I had the privilege of the information flow, there was no gene bank, there was no internet data like this. So we used to have newsletters. In 1995, I was dreaming of genomics in India. I could visualize that genomics would be big 20 years down the road. Unfortunately, at the Institute of Science, when we made a proposal for ninth plan to build a genomics center. Many scientists felt that this is a technical thing. It has no future. So I had only two votes out of 54 votes, and the idea was dropped. But I didn't want to drop that idea. I believed you know I could I actually got a job at Max Planck Gottingen. I could have run away. But I thought What will my grandchildren do think that you knew 20 years later genomics will be important for the nation and he went away. So I decided to shift from beautiful salubrious weather of Bangalore to hostile weather of Delhi and take a small Institute call center for biochemical technology and to build the Institute of genomics what you know today, Integrative Biology.

It would not happen if Indian-trained Mitali Mukherjee, Debasis Das, Veena Pillai would not have joined CBT. They joined with a belief that India can do it. None of them went abroad. None of them were trained to, they've never seen those machines that we brought. We imagine that they'll be robots. They'll be machines. There'll be a large number of sequencers. And we were lucky, that Department of Biotechnology Manju Sharma, believed in us and actually supported us. And that and Mashelkar has the confidence to let a small Institute of CBT undertake this courageous journey to build an institute of genomics. And today, you all know the post-pandemic era, how that institute has done when in 200 days, when TATA diagnostics was developed some people say wow. Yes, you know, it was a story. Once Picasso was sitting in a cafe, a small girl came and asked, Can you sketch my face to Picasso said, okay, he sketched something in three minutes and gave it, and then the girl said, "Can I have it? He said 1 million Frank. The girl asked "for this three minutes work?". He said, Yes, but behind these my 70 years of experience. So it is 20 years of effort to build genomics that IGIB is actually paid off 200 days of developing diagnostics or doing genomic surveillance, sequencing, everything to do provide India, whether it is the Omicron or delta cron, or Alpha, Beta to all these exercises is exactly. So you know, I always believed that we can actually kill more dreams than anything else. It can't be done, so India cannot do it. So I tell to the young people just don't listen to the old people. Don't listen to anybody who tells you that it cannot be done. 34 unicorns have been formed this year from a startup that believed it. When the government announced that we will be a startup nation. Stand up nation, startup nation, everybody made ridicule. I've seen television making fun. Okay, so look at it what we have done wonders, so, therefore, don't listen to anybody said that you cannot do it. I'm telling this to the young people. Then what happened? I'm sure Partha will recall, that we wanted to build the genetic landscape of India. Partha, and I sitting in Calcutta, we had a bet that can we do it in five years. He said it's impossible in this country. But I'm glad that I won that bet. And with 158, co-authored papers, two papers with 24 PII, we actually build the genetic landscape of India, the first nation to build a complete comprehensive map, I'm sure Partha, in this talk, maybe mentioned some of this work. What is interesting is if you go to Calcutta Museum, and the anthropology department, the last panel, actually shows that paper, which was published in the Journal of genetics, because it was not accepted, at the last minute Nature Genetics rejected it to be published in Indian Journal of genetics in the academic journal. So it has been more cited than many many papers, I think published in this journal. So, therefore, I believe Indian science has come of age in 2005. It is the young generation why such students, new generation of IIT students who believe that they can make a difference. So those unicorns has come off those 90s those who could have become scientists but decided to become engineers, IT entrepreneur make money, and then eventually they're making unicorns. So it is 2005 IISER students last 20 years, 15 years, the students that we produce, they are the future. This is where we have invested money on the best mind, giving them the best facilities and the best people who actually can fetch international recognition, and solve big national problems while solving big global problems. So in 2007, I realized that the entire healthcare sector is actually controlled by large pharmaceutical industries.

You know, I don't know how many of you realize that India is the pharmacy of the world. Today, I'm sure when the vaccine came, you have seen how much criticism happened for Covaxin, because it indigenously developed but now we all know that Covaxin gets very good protection even with the variation. And that's why I took this vaccine and not any other vaccine. But people were saying, oh, we should get Pfizer vaccine. So you know, it is Indian scientists themselves. Leaders actually do not support Indian science. So therefore, I will say to Indian scientists and young scientists just don't listen to them. This incident happened in 2007 when I came up with the idea that we should do open source drug discovery. Otherwise, nobody's going to put money for a $300 million TB drug or any drug, and we should go open source. Now where did I learn this? Look at the open-source Linux as created today large supercomputers have the 95% of the world supercomputer run on open-source Linux. So therefore, it is not that you cannot do business, but it creates an opportunity of crowdsourcing scientific knowledge, sharing it and eventually collectively solve problems. So open-source drug discovery when started in 2007, everybody said it is it not work is not going to work. But one person when it was published in Wall Street Journal, a talk of mine. It was Dr. William Heseltine send me a mail and say, Wow, what a brilliant idea. He is a Harvard professor and is the richest molecular biologist in the world who made lots of money. So he went he wrote a mail, I assure that I'm not going to be wrong. And today, I'm very proud to say that it will become the world's largest crowdsourcing platform, it created a movement of open source. And there are so many open source programs initiated. It brought a young generation of students interested in science. It creates a new model of education and training. And if you look at today, even Bill Gates after 10 years, says that the open-source model is the only way academia and to see tweeted it. I'm sure Mashelkar retweeted and said when say when you know India thought about it, SKB we thought about it, everybody says it will not work. So today if we look at COVID pandemic in 2020, the whole world realized the power of open source, power of sharing. We got our vaccination developed within such a short period, diagnostics developed, sequences were shared data was shared by Nature, Lancet, and everybody opened up their portals to share any COVID data was shared. Nobody had to buy a journal to access to those data. So open-source drug discovery, what was looked to be absurd, actually, today is a reality. So I still say I'm very glad that I have G.N. Ramachandran, Shekharan as a model who believed that you can challenge paradigms and keep doing world class science. And I'm very lucky that the system provided me the opportunity because, by the time I became director-general of CSIR, the OSDB was approved. So it was very easy for me to initiate and execute it. I don't know if there was somebody else to the Director-General whether I would have got the approval to get it done, but I can tell you it still would have happened. So, the differences are additional sanction. We had about 500 crore, Dr Chidambaram, but I was so nervous that as a DG CSIR, if I put that much money, so we decided to spend only 50 crores and the result that we have got is global. There was a study implemented by WHO and Professor asked me, Can you just do that report but he said I have not mentioned the money. If I mentioned the whole thing has been done for $12 million, then we'll have a serious problem with getting research grants in the United States. Therefore, it is impossible. So I was lucky to grow up and see how giants played their games. I'm sure that Virat Kohli saw Sachin Tendulkar, Sachin Tendulkar saw Sunil Gavaskar. I was lucky to see those talents and I could play a small role.

Where is the next we go? Ashutosh Sharma is talking about the future in the present. I think the future is very bright. What we should do and what we should do is hand over the baton to the younger generation. We may have created a lot of startups but our academia is not connected to them. We will have a lot of startups that will solve social problems. I called CSIR 800. The problems for 800 million Indians that we need to solve. I think government has created lots of opportunity in agrotech, AI application, drone application. So all this has a great future application of artificial intelligence and digital healthcare is going to be the great future. Why I'm saying this, is that India provides a great access to a billion people's health care. But with 36 billion dollars of government expenditure and 30 billion from the pocket, you cannot solve the $1.3 billion healthcare problem. So, therefore, we cannot go the Western way our healthcare problem has to be solved in an indigenous way. So we need to create innovative solutions, we need to create take up integrative healthcare, so that we can actually go into preventive care and wellness rather than only curative care. So therefore before medicine with health continuum and convergence of traditional medicine and knowledge making food as a health care substitute, replace the drugs and pharmaceuticals. I tell this to go back and see how Dr. Rama Rao and Hamid had a collaboration to bring down the AIDS drugs price. You know, we didn't have antibiotics in the 70s. We had to import. Today we are the largest producer of antibiotics and all medicines generic medicines. So it was the absolute fabulous collaboration between IICT scientist, CDRI, NSCL along with Ciplas' and Hamid's in the world to make a difference. The way Serum Institute has done I was very proud to say that my student from the Institute of Science, who is R&D head in Serum Institute, was the frontier to make the vaccine production. So one has to be so I see where is the one young boy who worked with me in Mohali IISER is working at Oxford on the upstream part of the vaccine very early days. So these students IISERs when they are back in India, as they're coming back and the facilities that we have created, the facilities that in under the leadership of our scientific advisors and government has produced and people like this DG CSIR and the Secretary DSP, like Ashutosh Sharma, who has done things, Ramaswamy, several of them, I think, will have a large impact. I think we can start expecting signs of world-class by 2030. And then hopefully, I don't know whether I will be alive, to see a science that goes recognized, but we don't have to worry about recognition of the best, as long as we can bring innovative solutions for the millions of Indians. I would be happy to see a proud Indian scientist and say, there is no poverty in this country. We have true science and technology, all I want Jodhpur IIT is to make the roads around no poverty. If Jodhpur can take a decision we will give solutions that Rajasthan will have no poverty will bring the neighboring states no poverty. Each IIT takes the oath, the students take the oath that we will make sure our technology and knowledge will make a difference for the millions and a billion people of the nation with this hope. I want to say 28 February, let's celebrate and say let these young people of India make a difference for the billions of this nation. Thank you very much. Thank you for giving me the audience to speak to. Thank you.

National Science Day 2022: Invited Talk 'Celebrating Human Diversity'

Prof. Partha P. Majumder

News & Views

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Thank you very much, Professor Chaudhuri. It's really an honor for me to be called upon to deliver this talk at IIT Jodhpur on the National Science Day. I've been listening to the talks by Professor Chidambaram and Professor Brahmachari, I would not have such a broad sweep of science and technology, post-independence and pre-independence as well. But I'm going to be extremely focused on a particular domain of science where I have made some contributions and I will chart the history of that particular domain and inform all of us what may have been the impacts of that kind of work on our understanding of India and the population of India. So I've titled my talk as Celebrating human diversity in India. And I'm going to chart the legacy of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis through this talk. The first point that I want to make is that we are talking about diversity, and diversity essentially means differences, that diversity would not exist if there were no differences. And I'm going to talk about human diversity. So I'm talking about differences among human individuals. The fact is that when we talk about diversity, human diversity really belongs to us. Sometimes we view diversity as though it's alien to us. But that's not true at all. It belongs to us. And we must learn to appreciate and share diversity, primarily because it helps unite and educate us if we understand what diversity is what we can learn from others, and we can actually improve ourselves and that's the reason why, that's one reason why we should celebrate diversity. The second reason is that understanding people and their backgrounds is crucial to personal and community growth. And there is cooperation builds respect builds towards other people, other communities, etc. And therefore, lack of understanding does not promote this growth. And therefore it is important for us to understand and to celebrate. Today is a chance to find out more about what we have in common rather than what separates us. Oftentimes, we try and think what separates us and that's a reason for a lot of strife, but if we try to find commonalities in the midst of all of these diversity that we have, that really helps in both personal and community growth, and also promotes peace and harmony among communities and among individuals. So that's the reason why we should celebrate, this is my explanation as to why we should celebrate diversity, I'm sure that other people will have other kinds of explanations as well.

The whole idea of studying diversity actually stemmed or studying diversity systematically stemmed from this person who actually established the Indian Statistical Institute and also is the father of statistical sciences in India. He was a firm believer that scientific and rational views lay the foundations of modern age. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis was, of course, preceded by a Britisher, whose name was Herbert Risley. Risley actually made a lot of measurements of people of India, but that was primarily from the point of view of quantification, and it was very descriptive in nature. Risley actually did not set out to answer specific questions, which Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis did, of course not alone in collaboration with a very famous anthropologist whose name was D. N. Majumdar and I'll come to that in a minute. The Indian Statistical Institute also has as its motto unity in diversity. And for those of us, like me, who grew up in the Indian Statistical Institute, we are a firm believer that in diversity there is unity, and therefore, we try to look at common threads, we have tried to find unifying heritage in the midst of all of this diversity. And that's essentially what I'm going to impress upon you. It's also interesting, you know, in view of what Professor Chidambaram has said, and what Professor Brahmachari has said, this is a something that's not known that the Indian Statistical Institute or when the Indian Statistical Institute was set up in 1931, there was no Institute of Statistics in the world. Well, there was in England, but no Statistical Institute in the United States of America. The India Statistical Institute was adopted as a model for the first Institute of Statistics that was established in the US at the Research Triangle Park by Marie Cox and this is a matter of great pride not just for Indian Statistical Institute and P. C. Mahalanobis but also for all of India and this is not very well known. So I thought that given what Professor Brahmachari and Professor Chidambaram have said, I think this is something that's significant, and we need to also be proud of the fact that statistical, the Indian Statistical Institute was adopted as a model in a developed country like the United States. Just to tell you a little bit about P. C. Mahalanobis and how he got into all of these diversity kinds of activities, and how he set up the Indian Statistical Institute, because I've been told that today we also need to look at legacy, and look at legacy of our scientists. So I'm just concentrating on one scientist, P. C. Mahalanobis. In 1912, he passed B.Sc. with honors in physics from Presidency College in Calcutta, and left for England to study at the King's College, Cambridge. He got his tripos there and returned home for a short vacation and never went back. Of course, the reason that he never went back was because the war intervened, and he was unable to go back. At that time, he was asked to teach physics at Presidency College and he was indeed a physicist by training. He became a Professor of Physics at Presidency College in 1922, and served until 1948. Just before he was leaving Cambridge and boarding the ship, his tutor in King's College, Macaulay, drew his attention to this journal called Biometrica. Biometrica was then the journal, the first journal in statistics and of course, statistics grew out of these various kinds of biometrical measurements that people had done, and for those people who had systematically done biometrical measurements on humans and other animals and plants was Karl Pearson and Karl Pearson's name I highlight primarily because his name will come up again during my talk. Mahalanobis found some of the papers when the college gave him one volume of Biometrica, he found some of the papers in the Biometrica journal rather interesting, and he bought a whole set of volumes on his long trip, ship trip back to India, and he bought this entire set of volumes of biometric data that was available and studied all of the papers during his long voyage. He formed the statistical laboratory in Presidency College that was to eventually be established in 1931 as the Indian Statistical Institute and that's a picture of the Indian Statistical Institute. When he joined the Calcutta University, there was a Department of Philosophy, there still is, there was a Department of Philosophy and Acharya Brajendranath Seal was the Head of the Department of Philosophy. Acharya Seal was a polymath, he had a very broad vision. He knew a lot of subjects and one of the things that he told P. C. Mahalanobis is that - Prasanta you have to do work in India similar to what Karl Pearson has done in England. I found this note in the archives of P. C. Mahalanobis and this is the real translation. The note was actually written in Bengali by Brajendranath Seal to P. C. Mahalanobis. So, Brajendranath Seal was already aware of Karl Pearson and his work in England. And again to remind you Karl Pearson was the first editor of the journal Biometrica. In 1920 Mahalanobis went to the Indian Science Congress that was held in Nagpur and there he met Nelson Annandale.That was to change his life forever, Mahalanobis’s life forever. Nelson Annandale was the Director of the Zoological and Anthropological Survey of India. One of the things that during the discussion that they had in the Indian Science Congress, they tried to figure out with the Anglo Indians, which were really meetings between the native Indians and the Britishers, what, were they closer to the Britishers were they more similar to the Indians and so on and so forth. So they thought of some interesting types of questions on the Anglo Indians and Mahalanobis set out to answer those questions by measuring physical dimensions of the Anglo Indians of Calcutta. And it was a series of papers that were published in the records of the Indian Museum, if not for anything else, this lay the seeds of statistical, of the growth of statistical science in India. It did not, I don't believe that these studies on Anglo Indians really impacted very much on human gene later Human Genome Diversity studies, but it did lay the foundations of statistical science and it also, you know, brought to the fore some questions that were later asked during the genome diversity studies and other diversity study human diversity studies in India. In 1925, Mahaloanobis, a statistician, was invited to deliver the Presidential address in the anthropology section of the Indian Science Congress. And he titled his lecture as “Analysis of race mixture in Bengal”. And he of course based very much on the studies that he had done in Bengal among the Anglo Indians and the types of questions that he asked and this is just a sampling of two questions. Do the Anglo Indian show greater affinity with the higher castes of Bengal or with the lower castes? In other words, did the meetings take place between the higher caste populations with the Britishers, or the lower caste populations? That will show the affinity measurement of affinity would provide an answer to this question. Is there any appreciable similarity with the aboriginal tribes of the Anglo Indians with the evolved tribes? When he was thinking about these problems, and I'm not going to give you in detail what the answers to these questions were or the kind of answers that they came up with. The important part is that we talk about these words affinity, distance, similarity, and so on and so forth.

At that time, there were no measures of this, there were no statistics of measuring distance between members of two populations. In other words, you could not based on observations of members of population groups, you couldn't actually quantify the distance between these two populations, you needed a measure of distance and this measure of distance because they were talking about anthropometric measurements this measure of distance had to be based on anthropometric measurements. At that time Mahalanobis was aware that Karl Pearson was thinking along the same lines, and he was studying various kinds of races in Europe, and he had constructed a coefficient of racial likeness and had applied that to skull dimensions of various fossils found in Burma and elsewhere. This paper was also published in Biometrica, but Mahalanobis came to a realization when he looked at the structure, the mathematical structure of the coefficient of racial likeness. At the same time, he was doing the studies on Anglo Indians of Calcutta. And he says, I soon realized that Karl Pearson c-squared, which is the coefficient of racial likeness was properly a test of genetic data, properly a test of diverse divergence between two samples, rather than a measure of actual magnitude of divergence. This really means that let me explain this in 30 seconds. This really means that if you have two samples of individuals from two population groups, what the coefficient of ratios like this did was to look at the divergence between these two sets of samples, it was not an estimator of the true unknown distance between the two population groups for the proper estimate of the true unknown distance, it needed to be independent of the sample size, it could not, the measure could not depend on the sample size. And that was the major problem with the inclusion of racial likeness. So, this is exactly what I said the magnitude of c-squared depends on the size of the samples and a proper estimate should be independent of the sample size. Mahalanobis wanted to study this, better also wanted to discuss with Karl Pearson before he started thinking afresh about measurement of distance between population groups. So he went back to England in 1926/27, and spent about six months in Karl Pearson's laboratory at the University College in London. And he soon realized that it was really a stress test of divergence and was not an actual measure of the magnitude of divergence, because it was dependent on the sample size. So he thought of his own measure, and I'm not going to give you the equations to these measures that he or the CRL you know, the actual mathematical formula, but Mahalanobis thought of, and he called that as the first Provisional Measure of caste distance. And he called that as D and he proposed that in analysis of race mixture in Bengal and this was the title of his talk in the Indian Science Congress, Anthropology section in 1925.

He realized that, you know, a large body of experimental data, anthropometric data, were available on various European populations. And one of the things that he realized was that, you know, on each individual you're taking a multidimensional vector of observations on various anthropometric measurements, body dimensions of each individual. And what CRL, the Coefficient of Racial Likeness, was doing is that it was not taking correlations or body measurements into account. In other words, your length of the total length of the leg is correlated with the length of the femur. And therefore, these correlations needed to be taken into account and you couldn't read those observations as independent observations on the same individual. And the coefficient of racial likeness was not taking that into account. So Mahalanobis thought about that and devised a measure. And that measure was called, well he initially called the D later, it was refined, and was published in the Asiatic Society of Bengal called tests and measures of group divergence, and this particular formulation of the D squared statistic. And he derived many properties of the D squared statistic, and applied them in various situations. And those are undoubtedly the most profound contributions of PC Mahalanobis. He, like I said, was the father of statistical science in India, he made many seminal contributions to statistical science. But this was undoubtedly his most profound contribution, and this is globally acclaimed. You don't really have to have your measuring in this context, you're measuring distance between two human population groups. But you could also measure the distance between, let's say, two sets of screws produced by two separate machines. And if you wanted to measure the distance on each screw, then you would measure the diameter, maybe the length of the spirals and so on and so forth. And based on a series of measurements, you could actually measure the distance between two inanimate objects. So this is not this, the D-squared measure can be applied on any multi-dimensional vector of observations on any unit that you want to think about, whether it's human individual, kangaroos, what have you. So it's very, very widely used. And this has been a very profound contribution of P C Mahalanobis. While he was doing it, Mahalanobis met with Nelson Annandale and later he also met D.N. Majumdar who was an anthropologist, and they undertook an anthropological survey of the United Provinces. In the late 1930s United Provinces was Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and that particular area was called United Provinces and they undertook a statistical study of these provinces, and they came up with various kinds of statistical methods in order to depict a multi-dimensional observations on a two-dimensional plane. Many of you are absolutely familiar with principal components analysis. So, this is a forerunner of the principal components analysis that Mahalanobis had thought about, you know, perpendicular ordinates and correlated measurements and therefore, you needed some mathematical transformation and those were thought through and they were later defined as principal components. So in the UP anthropometric survey, they chose a series of populations two Brahmin groups, four artisan groups, eight tribal groups, and some groups that were historically or anthropologically known to be due to hybridization of Brahmin groups with artisan groups and or between artisan groups and tribal groups such as the Chamar (lower castes), and a whole set of populations whose political history was not been inferred. So, the question that they ask is, you know, in these cases, in some cases, we know the anthropological history, are they both worn out by physical dimensions by a study of the physical dimensions of samples of individuals from these population groups etc. So, or is there a correspondence between body dimensions and the social hierarchy that these population groups enjoy? And they did find that among some of the groups that formed the means, sequence of populations, there is close correspondence between social status and resemblance to the Brahmins, the Brahmins occupying the highest tier in the in the caste hierarchy. And but also they found that, you know, in terms of the origins, such as the origins of the Chatri, the Muslims, the Gariyas the Muslims of United Provinces were primarily converted Muslims, but we were as a result of hybridization between groups and they found that there are a number of cases in which physical evidence definitely indicates possible origins contrary to accepted opinion. So based on physical dimensions, they were looking at these human diversity and they were trying to answer certain questions that relates social structure with body dimensions and origins with bodies, inferring origins using body dimensions and they found that in some cases there was a correlation or correspondence but in some cases there was no relationship between inferred anthropological origins and body dimensions. They were also acutely aware of the way that you could use these population nomenclature as upper caste, lower castes, etc., so they avoided using those and they used a neutral word ‘group’ and also defined what they meant by a group these are ethically important that you need to use neutral words. And today it's become extremely important because of, you know, Equity, Diversity Inclusion, these kinds of considerations. And they define the group as being as consisting of individuals who belong to the same caste, religion or tribe and who live in the same district. After the UP anthropometric survey, Mahalanobis, D. N. Majumdar also had lots of questions about populations of Bengal and this was undivided Bengal. This was East Bengal and West Bengal combined. They undertook an anthropometric survey of populations in Bengal and as you can see, Mahalanobis is not an author of this particular paper. It is Mahalanobis’ disciple, C. R. Rao, the oldest living Statistician in the world today, he’s over 101 years old. C. R. Rao and D. N. Majumder, the anthropologist worked together while Mahalanobis was relegated to the background and let the baton be carried forward by C.R. Rao. He wrote a foreword to this particular report of the Bengal anthropometric survey. And in the foreword, or in the conclusions, he says that one of the important contributions is the demonstration of regional differences within the social group that is between individuals adopting the same caste tribal or religious name, but living in different geographical locations. So essentially, what this means is that, you know, if you had the same population, the same social group, let's say calling themselves as Brahmins, but they lived in two different geographical locations, their physical dimensions became so dissimilar that it would be quite difficult to actually think of them as being one social group. So it shows that and then they concluded that it shows that a term like Brahmins of Bengal has to be used with some caution. Essentially, the geographical distance actually creates a lot of difference or over a period of generations creates a lot of difference in physical dimensions as well. This could be intrinsic, or this could also be because of environmental factors, and we'll come to that in a minute. Another interesting feature is that sometimes there is closer resemblance between caste groups within a district than between individuals of the same caste group belonging to different districts. In other words, again, geographical distance plays a major role in determining how the similarities of individuals who live close, even though they belong to the same group, but live in geographical proximity, versus living in geographical isolation.

Well, Mahalanobis came to the conclusion that anthropometry was really not a good set of characteristics to study population divergence and answer questions such as origins of populations, it has to be, he said, it has to be supplemented by other physical genetic and serological data. And he says that our experience with anthropometry has not been very convincing. It was providing equivocal answers about population groups and their relationships. And he said that blood group variations need to be looked into. So the Bengal anthropometric survey on a subset of individuals, they looked at blood groups and actually devised certain statistical methods to depict A/B/O blood groups. But again, soon they came to the realization that A/B/O blood group was just one system, one genetic system, which did not have too much of information in order to draw inferences about these population relationships or about population ancestries and D. N. Majumdar actually emphasized that they cannot give any clue to the ethnic origin or for that matter, any part of the country unless these findings are reinforced by multiple genetic systems. So just to recall what Mahalanobis said, having realized this Mahalanobis also had the foresight that he should set up a human genetics unit at the Indian Statistical Institute, and he did indeed set up an intermediate unit at the Indian Statistical Institute and continued to do various kinds of population work looking at genomic genetic diversity of populations. When I joined the Indian Statistical Institute, the human genetics unit, well, it was called the anthropometry and human genetics unit, and later bifurcated into human genetics unit, which I headed and, and biological anthropology, which was headed by an anthropologist. All right, I'll come to the last few minutes of my talk, essentially, talking about human evolution, using genomic data. To cut a long story short, and I'm essentially going to focus on India, and the work that's been done in India. But to put this in perspective, humankind modern humans, like you and I, we all evolved in Africa. So we are talking about genomic diversity, it is really a heritage. It's a heritage that comes out of Africa. And it came, we came, we were, we were born in Africa, so to say about 200,000 years ago, and we came out of Africa about 100,000 years ago, we can only speculate why we have come out of Africa, perhaps we over reproduced and there was enormous pressure of natural resources, we were hunter-gatherers at that time. And therefore, because of lack of natural resources, we probably started to explore other geographical areas, in search of food, etc. When I talk about these dates, these dates also have standard, large standard errors. So 100,000 years could be anywhere between 80,000 years and 120,000 years. So please bear that in mind, because these dates are not absolutely sacrosanct.

When we came out of Africa, after that, we started to explore other landmasses. And we moved around, one of the first places that we came to after we moved out of Africa was India. And one of the last places that we went to was by crossing the Bearing Strait and going and populating the new world, the America. So this is how we moved around. And this much of this is through reconstruction of fossil remains as also from various kinds of genetic studies. When we came out of Africa, and we went to Europe, we found that we were not alone. There were at least two other hominid cousins that were roaming around on Europe on the plains of Europe. One was called the Neanderthals, there were plenty of them, plenty of Neanderthals were roaming around. And we also got to know much later that there was another species called Denisovans. They were called Denisovans. We have named them, they are called Denisovans, because they were found in the Denisova cave in Siberia, and there was a finger bone that was found. DNA was isolated from the finger bones. And DNA was also isolated from various skulls and other fossil remains of the Neanderthals. And when we compare the DNA sequences, you find that they were such great differences that Denisovans could not be Neanderthals. And Neanderthals could not be Denisovans. So they were two separate species. What happened to them? When we came to Europe, very shortly thereafter, both Neanderthals and Denisovans vanished from the face of this planet. Did we over reproduce ourselves? And because we were better users of tools and weapons we actually killed them? The answer is no. Again, the answer comes from genomic studies where genome sequences of modern humans, Denisovans and Neanderthals have been compared. And we have statistical methods of estimating whether there has been any admixture, or introgression of the genomes. And indeed, what we have found is that Neanderthals contributed to both modern human genomes and Denisovan genomes and Denisovan genomes also contributed to modern human genomes. And essentially, this means that we all mated with each other. We were not completely isolated populations. The product of these matings, when there was a mating between, let's say, Neanderthals and modern humans, the child of that mating, the offspring of that mating went with the modern human groups, depleting the size of the Neanderthal group and over a period of time, the Neanderthal group, size of the Neanderthal group depleted to as a to such extent that they became extinct. As a result of these studies, we also know that there was a potential, so essentially, they made love, not war. As a result of these genomic studies, we also know that our genome contains DNA, pieces of DNA that do not belong to us, do not belong to the Denisovans, do not belong to the Neanderthals. Do not belong to us, meaning that when we compare for example, with our ancestral populations, there are such portions of our genomes that cannot be traced back to another modern human nor to a Denisovan, not even to a Neanderthal. So, there are these potential unknown hominins. This was interesting and when we started our work in India and we did the studies on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Jarawas, the Onge, the tribal populations of Andaman and Nicobar Islands and we were looking at their origins and their population structure. Again, I'm not going to describe in details on that I will say at this point, the Anadamanese population structure is such that they have a separate ancestry compared to populations of mainland India, I will primarily focus on mainland India. These Andamanese people, we found in their genomes unknown bits and pieces, fragments of DNA that could not be traced back to any of the known ancestors, not you, not even to the Neanderthals, or Denisovans. So, here also among the Anadamanese people, pieces of DNA that could be, that needed to be attributed to a potentially unknown hominin. While we were doing this study, there was another group of people who were studying tribal populations of Melanesia. And there also they found that the ancient Melanesians integrate with a mysterious hominid. Suffice it to say that there was a lot of coastal migration from out of Africa, into India, through Australia to Papua New Guinea and so on and so forth to these various Island populations. We still don't know whether the mysterious population that the geneticists who were studying Melanesians that mysterious hominid was the same as the mysterious hominid that we found in Andaman and Nicobar Island because they have not released their DNA sequence data yet. So if they release their data, then we can easily answer this question whether there was an ancestry or mating with a mysterious hominid or an unknown hominin, who was roaming around in these, through these Island populations, at that time in ancient times. While we were looking at these Indian populations, etc., several of us, including Professor Brahmachari, Mitali, and groups in IGIB and elsewhere, we came together with a whole set of geneticists from various parts of Asia, and we wanted to anchor Indian genomes in the context of Asia. And what, let me just quickly explain all of these names of population groups of Asia, Southeast Asia, Japan, etc., many countries in Asia. And also if I can explain this graph to the left of your screen, left of my screen, essentially, this graph is ordered in such a way that the oldest population, the most ancient populations are to the bottom of the graph, and the most recent populations are to the top of the graph. So if we look at Indian populations, where do they belong? Are they in the top of the graph? Or are they at the bottom of the graph? I've already told you that after humankind evolved in Africa, they came out of Africa and got into India, and therefore the expectation even before this work, and this work is based on hundreds of thousands of DNA markers. And looking at, I will explain this kind of checkered coloured picture later in my talk right now, I won't I'm only focusing on this particular tree, which is called a phylogenetic tree based on relationship, depicting relationships among population groups of Asia based on the assessment of their genomes. Essentially, even before we drew this tree, we knew that Indian population should belong to the bottom of this tree, meaning, should be ancient, because human populations came out of Africa and populated India, to begin with. So indeed, what we found is that there is an early divergence, and these are populations of India. We looked at a small number of populations at that time, money was scarce and so we did not, this is 2009, over 10 to 12 years ago, and there were some populations that we had sampled from North and East India, there were some populations that we had sampled from South India and essentially what was shown is that the ancestries of populations in North and East India was different from the ancestries is from the populations from South India. Now, this was based on the small number of populations and therefore, we want to study this in greater detail, especially in the context of India. So again, Professor Brahmachari who was by then the Director General, I don't, can't remember, but essentially we wanted to look at the entire ethnic composition of India and draw inferences about the ethnic composition of India and if you look at the anthropological classification, there are 450 tribal populations, including sub-castes, there are about 4000 sub-castes and about 150 religious and migrant groups, they have different kinds of social organizations and do various kinds of occupations. They also speak different kinds of languages; Austroasiatic Dravidian, Tibeto Burman, Indo European and so on. And I would like to point out that the Austroasiatic language of speech is essentially spoken by some tribal populations of India such as the Santhals and Mundas and so on. So, that's exclusively spoken by the tribal populations of India. So, like I said that Professor Brahmachari essentially came up with this money and I think there were a total of six CSIR institutions and the Indian Statistical Institute and we all came together and we sampled a large number of populations from across India. And we actually scored each genome on the basis of 405 markers and tried to find relationships among these genomes of groups of individuals belonging to these various populations on the basis of the data, on the basis of these 405 genetic markers. I will just show you what we reconstructed essentially what these are, this is again another way of depicting a phylogenetic tree providing the depicting the relationships among these various populations, sufficing to say that this population is coloured by language groups. And as you will see that there is strong clustering of these population groups by language, but I must also point out that in India, language and geography are confounded, people in northern parts of India speak Indo European languages, people in southern parts of India speak Dravidian languages, in the Northeastern part of India, Tibeto Burman languages, and Austroasiatic language of speech is the fragmented linguistic family spoken in central and eastern regions of India inhabited by the tribals. So, essentially, if you look at this particular population reconstruction, you find that it's clustered by language. Also, you can interpret this as clustered by geography. We then became a little bit more greedy. Technologies had evolved costs for sequencing entire human genomes had fallen. And we undertook a major project in Asia based on sequencing of genomes. And this was called the Genome Asia 100 Key Project. Again, looking at Asia and looking at India, that was our interests looking at India in the context of Asia, primarily by looking at whole genomes, as opposed to six points on the genome, we sampled a large number of populations. And as you can see in this map, each circle represents a population and the size of the circle is proportional to the sample size. This is based on sequencing efforts and we also estimated the amount of Neanderthal admixture in each of our Indian populations, essentially, 2 to 3% of our genomes, comprise the Neanderthal genomes, less than 1% of our genomes comprise the Denisovan genomes. And also, but with respect to the Denisovan genomes, there is an interesting structure, which is that the tribal populations contain the highest amount of Denisovan genomes, even if it's less than 1% of our entire genome, it is a significant proportion primarily because our entire genome, as Professor Brahmachari has said is 3 billion nucleotides. And even 1% of 3 billion nucleotides is quite significant chunk of DNA. And if we move from the tribal populations to the upper caste populations, there is a reduction in the extent of Denisovan admixture in our genomes in the genomes of these populations. And that's interesting and significant. I don't have the time to actually explain in greater detail. One of the questions that we had asked is that, you know, India comprises a vast array of genetically heterogeneous populations and, they all came at different times from different places and may have different ancestries, and one of the questions that we had is, how many footfalls or distinct ancestral types can we find in mainland India? And of course, this question was asked by multiple people, we did this study when, you know, ask these questions when I was at the Indian Statistical Institute and we had we completed the answer to these questions when I established the National Institute of Human Biomedical Genomics, primarily because technologies became available in this institute. So, prior to that, the group from CCMB and the group from Harvard Medical School, they have collaborated to reconstruct Indian population history. They also asked the same question, how many ancestral types can we find, and they essentially found that there are two ancestral types, one comprising the North Indian population and one comprising the Southern Indian populations. Now, the sampling, the number of populations sampled in this particular study was restricted, for example, they did not have any samples from Northeast of India. So, if Northeast of India has had a different ancestry, they would not be able to detect it. So, we said that we should, our sampling was much better. So we said that we should look at this question afresh, and we did that. Actually, there was a considerable amount of overlap when they were doing the study, and we were doing our study. And this is the result of our study, I'll give you the take-home message right in the beginning, we established, we estimated admixture in each individual that we sampled and we found evidence of 4 ancestral populations in mainland India. And so let me explain this graph on the x-axis, you have a very large number of dots that you can't even see, and I couldn't number those, these are individuals, these dots represent individuals. Each vertical line essentially represents the extent of genomes, how much of it is pristine, and how much of it is admixed by genomes of other populations or other individuals. So each color represents an ancestral type. And each vertical line represents an individual and the checkered colors essentially represent the extent of admixture that there is in the genomes of that particular individual from different ancestral types. So if you look to the left of the screen, you find that then these are pristine, almost pristine, green genomes. And if you look to the right, they're almost pristine blue genomes. And if you look, somewhat three-quarters of the distance from the left-hand side, you find the sky blue, and there are some pristine genomes of the sky blue, and similarly, in the center, there are some pristine red genomes. So these are individuals who are from different populations, but are essentially unadmixed. But if you look at the other regions of this graph, you'll find that the vertical lines are checkered by different colors. But overall, there are four different colors and these four different colors represent the ancestries. So most of us have multiple ancestries, or at least genomes from multiple ancestors, there are only a few who have pristine genomes meaning that we have unadmixed genomes from one particular ancestral types. Can we identify these ancestral types? Yes, we can. We know where we have sampled these populations from we know what kind of languages they speak, the geographical region of sampling etc. And we have been able to identify these four ancestral types as Indo European, Dravidian, Austroasiatic, and Tibeto Burman. So, these are the four ancestral types that are present in mainland India. Again, I emphasize that there is a confounding between geographical regions of habitat and language, North India, South India, Central India, fragmented Austroasiatic and Northeast of India. We published this in PNAS. The data that we gathered in the Genome Asia project not only informed about genomic diversity and the population structure and the origins of populations, etc., they also provide information on predisposition to diseases, response to drugs, interactions with environmental factors, propensity to infections, progressions of diseases, etc. So in other words, the genome comprises a huge lot of information and studies on Genome Diversity can actually inform medical sciences, well, in addition to providing basic evidence of our ancestry, where do we come from, etc. I don't have the time to explain all of this but mean in this particular study in Genome Asia study, we did find some very interesting cancer-predisposing genes as well. So I come to the last slide, which is my most important slide and this is the slide that I want to, the notion that I want to leave you with and this slide I'm going to read out the slide, of course, I know that you can read English but still, I'm going to read out this slide makes me feel good. This is a passage from a poet, African American poet, Maya Angelou, and I'm going to read it out to you. It says “It is time for the preachers, the Rabbi's, the priests and the pundits, and the professors to believe in the awesome wonder of diversity so that they can teach those who follow them. It's time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity, there is beauty and there is strength. We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry. And we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value, no matter their color equal in importance, no matter their texture. Thank you very much for your attention. I greatly appreciate the invitation accorded to me by IIT Jodhpur, and Professor Santanu Chaudhuri and Mitali Mukerji. Thank you very much.

Math Lab: Learning Math by Doing Math

Vivek Vijay, Sandeep Kumar Yadav and Vivek Sahu

Research Snippets

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Significant progress has been made in the field of mathematics education in developing theoretical, experimental and research-based evidence about mathematical pedagogies. Much of this progress is converted into research projects that engage teachers to enhance learning to teach mathematics. These projects have shown various possibilities for teachers and students and created a support system for teachers in their own learning. Most of these projects aim to complement the abstraction of mathematics by visualization or experimentation. We present eight different mathematical instruments designed as per the NCERT curriculum of mathematics from standard 6 to standard 10. We have created these instruments in such a way that they make students visualize every concept that they are learning theoretically. Also, they can learn mathematics concepts by playing with these instruments. The instruments were used in two schools, and our quick observations are that the mathematical visuality helps students remember the concepts for a longer time.

1. Introduction
Mathematics is assumed to be a self-contained system separated from the physical world. The direction of abstraction is always from a set of contexts to an abstract concept. The word ‘Abstraction’ is defined differently by different people. In the words of Aristotle, it is the omission of qualities from concrete experience (Damerow, 1996). Skemp (1986) defines abstraction as an activity by which we become aware of similarities. Sfard (1991) describes abstraction as an interiorisation-condensation-reification cycle. However, the word “abstract” popularly tends to mean not concrete or decontextualized, thus unreal and meaningless. Mathematical concepts which are often regarded as meaningless symbols which have to be manipulated according to well-defined rules are called abstract-apart, that is, they exist apart from the context they are abstracted from. On the other hand, concepts which derive their meaning from the context they are abstracted from, are called abstract-general (Mitchelmore 2002). Most of the textbooks of mathematics are written in ABC (Abstract Before Concept) form and it is therefore easy for the teachers to follow the same. As a result, students gain only abstract-apart knowledge. It does not help in any problem situation and therefore, students quickly forget it (White and Mitchelmore, 1996).

Dubinsky and McDonald (2001) developed the APOS (Action, Process, Objects, Schema) theory to explain the tendencies of an individual and interpret these constructions. The underlying principle of APOS is that an action is the transformation of instructions that are concerned with how objects are perceived by the individuals. There is no requirement of external stimuli by the repetitions and reflection of these actions. By their engagements in similar actions, students achieve an internal mental construction, called a process. It is interesting and important to note that the learner may think about reversing while a process takes place and may combine it with others. The object is the development of a process, in which the learner considers it to be finished and understands that it can be transformed. An idea or a blueprint for a specific mathematical concept is a background of other ideas, which should be related to a problem case which requires APOS. These are also connected to some fundamentals to create a framework in the learner’s mind (Yilmaz and Argun 2018).

Visualization appears in the development of mathematical thoughts as well as the discovery of new relations between theoretical concepts, and for providing meaning to mathematical objects and the existing relationships among them. According to Presmeg (1986), a visual method of solution of a mathematical problem is one which involves visual imagery, with or without a diagram, as an essential part of the method of solution, even if reasoning of algebraic methods are also employed. A person’s mathematical visuality is the extent to which he/ she prefers to use visual methods when attempting problems which both visual and non-visual methods may solve. Similarly, a teacher’s mathematical visuality is the extent to which the teacher uses visual presentations while teaching mathematics. A model about visual thinking, VA (Visualization-Analysis) model, was developed by Zazkis et al. (1996). The VA model includes terminology about discrete levels of visual and analytical thinking. Brain researchers have found that students who are most successful with number problems are those who are using different brain pathways – one that is numerical and symbolic and the other that involves more intuitive and spatial reasoning (Park and Brannon, 2013). They found that the two approaches, strategies and memorization, involve two distinct pathways in the brain. Those who learned through strategies achieved superior performance over those who memorized. Rosken and Rolka (2006) employed a qualitative methodology to capture the importance of visualization in the learning of integral calculus.

The above discussion clearly presents different ways of teaching and learning mathematics; however, it is commonly observed that understanding patterns and visualization help students learn even complex mathematics and apply them to new problems.

We present novel and thought-provoking experiments for the school students (standard 6 to standard 10) to learn each topic of mathematics by doing it. A total of 8 equipment are designed to conduct chapter by chapter experiments with the help of a study manual. These equipment are low-cost, affordable devices that are easy to use and with no maintenance cost. The objectives of the Math Lab are –

To provide a platform to the teachers to teach the basic concepts of mathematics through experimentations and visualization

To use equipment for hands-on on the topics such as Algebra, Number System, Geometry, Data Handling, Mensuration etc and their solutions

To visualize the proofs of theorems of geometry, lines and angles, quadrilaterals, symmetry of triangles and other related results

The presentation of the paper is as follows –
In the next section, we introduce the equipment with their broad areas of applications. Section 3 covers the demonstration of one of these devices through a simple mathematics problem and also presents some observations. Section 4 concludes the article.

2. The equipment
The equipment is designed to complement the abstraction of mathematics by experimentation. Sometimes teachers struggle to explain simple mathematics concepts because of a lack of visualization techniques. For example,
- How to visualize rational and irrational numbers?
- How to see whether two linear equations are solvable, have unique solutions or infinitely many solutions?
- Finding roots of polynomials has always been a challenging task.
- How to visualize the proofs of all geometric theorems?
- How to understand trigonometry by doing it?
- How to apply abstract concepts to a new problem?
The above problems are addressed through a set of equipment; the Math-Lab which consists of following eight equipments –

Algebra Annotator –

The algebra annotator is designed for learning by visualizing and doing the activities involving variables. The biggest challenge in learning algebra is understanding of the operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of the variables and functions of variables. This one equipment serves the purpose of explaining the solutions of equations of one variable, multiplication and addition of monomials and polynomials. Through some balancing tricks, the solutions of one variable are explained.

Number System Operator –

A positive or a negative outcome is always a problem in using operations between numbers. This operator helps in learning the concept by doing the experiments. Teachers can use this device to explain some of the properties of Natural Numbers, Whole Numbers and Integers as per the levels of students. Demonstration of ascending and descending orders of numbers is another byproduct of this instrument.

Geometry Expositor –

Students are much bothered about understating the statements and proofs of theorems. This one equipment is the solution bank of all geometrical concepts. Starting from understating the angles between two lines to visualizing the properties of parallel lines, triangles, quadrilaterals, this single equipment is loaded with a number of activities to excite the students.

Fraction Tester –
How is the whole divided into fractions? How different fractions are combined to get a whole? The fraction tester tests and simplistically validates these concepts. This equipment is useful, especially for students of standards 6 and 7.

Equation Solver –
Are two linear equations always solvable? Is the solution unique, if they are solvable? How to find roots of a quadratic equation? Further, how to see the roots of a cubic polynomial? How to visualize a quadratic equation for the existence of its roots? How to create an equation from its roots? The equation solver is an excellent equipment to observe and visualize these problems and find the pathway to get the solutions. This one equipment serves the purpose of visualization of various mathematical problems.

Coordinate System Demonstrator –
The basis of coordinate geometry is the coordinate system. For understanding the different quadrants and coordinates in a two dimensional plane, this system demonstrates several different properties to visualize the coordinate geometry. The resultant of addition of coordinates, scaling up and scaling down, change of location and scale can be easily demonstrated by this device.

Circle Descriptor –
It starts and ends at the same point, the circle is one of the most beautiful geometrical figures which has several good characteristics. However, understating the properties and theorems is a herculean task. The descriptor is designed for doing some experiments for learning the circle in a straightforward manner. The equipment also explains the concepts of pie-charts, probability and fractions at a higher level. Construction of angles is one of the most important experiments using this device.

Mensuration Evaluator –
Measurement of area and volume of solids is one of the most interesting exercises in Mathematics, if understood properly. The evaluator will help the teacher demonstrate the concepts and help the students learn the concepts by doing some hands-on.
Accessories are developed to conduct the experiments using these devices. To make use of these accessories, a manual has been created. This manual is chapter by chapter and experiment by experiment demonstrates the use of these devices for the purpose of explanation.

3. Demonstration –
Consider an elementary problem of solving (+2) + (-3). The expression is written in the space provided in the device, see figure 2. The accessories are used to first go 2 steps up and then three steps down. The final solution is -1. Similarly, one can explain closure properties of addition and subtraction and ascending and descending orders of numbers.

Some observations –
Two Math Labs were set up at Gayatri Vidya Mandir and Smart Study International School of Rajsamand district of Rajasthan State. A group of students from a class was taught some of the concepts theoretically and another group from the same class was used for the experimental teaching. Both the groups understood the concepts well in the beginning. A surprise test was conducted after 15 days. Students who learnt with the help of the Math Lab equipment were found better than the first group. The experiment group said that they could recollect the concepts due to the visualization analysis.

4. Conclusions
There are several ways to teach mathematics but visualization and experimentation are observed to be better in the sense of engaging students in activities. Students achieve an internal mental construction by engaging in experiments, called a process. Students also think about reversing while a process is taking place and combining this process with others. This helps the students understand the pattern in their own manner to remember the concepts. They can then apply the concepts to any new problem.

References:
Zazkis, R., Dubinsky, Ed, Dautermann, J. (1996). Coordinating visual and analytical strategies: A students’ understanding of the group D4, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, Vol. 27 (4), pp. 435-457
Presmeg, N. C. (1986). Visualization in high school mathematics. For the Learning of Mathematics, Vol. 6 (3), pp. 42-46.
Rösken, B., & Rolka, K. (2006, July). A picture is worth a 1000 words–the role of visualization in mathematics learning. In Proceedings 30th Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education. Vol. 4, pp. 457-464.
Damerow, P. (1996). Abstraction and Representation. In Abstraction and Representation (pp. 371-381). Springer, Dordrecht.
Skemp, R. (1986). The psychology of mathematics learning. Suffolk: Penguin Books.
Sfard, A. (1991). On the dual nature of mathematical conceptions: Reflections on processes and objects as different sides of the same coin. Educational studies in mathematics, Vol. 22(1), pp. 1-36.
White, P., & Mitchelmore, M. (1996). Conceptual knowledge in introductory calculus. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 27(1), 79-95.
Mitchelmore, M. C. (2002). The Role of Abstraction and Generalisation in the Development of Mathematical Knowledge.
Dubinsky, E., & McDonald, M. A. (2001). APOS: A constructivist theory of learning in undergraduate mathematics education research. In the teaching and learning of mathematics at university level (pp. 275-282). Springer, Dordrecht.
Yilmaz, R., & Argun, Z. (2018). Role of visualization in mathematical abstraction: The case of congruence concept. International Journal of Education in Mathematics, Science and Technology, 6(1), 41-57.
Park, J., & Brannon, E. M. (2013). Training the approximate number system improves math proficiency. Psychological Science, 24(10), 2013-2019.

Multicomponent Reactions in Organic Synthesis Pursuits

Supriya, Ghanshyam Mali, Amar Nath Singh Chauhan, Kailas Arjun Chavan and Rohan D. Erande

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Synthetic organic chemistry fosters various fields, counting synthesis and isolation of natural products, new drug discovery, material, and polymer [1]. The amount of industrial chemicals available to make our lives easier is growing at an exponential rate. Ultimately, it poses a hazard in the future because a wide range of substances have been discovered to be persistent over time that inflicts detrimental effects on humans and wildlife. The concept of multicomponent reactions (MCRs) was introduced to circumvent. MCRs are an emerging class of organic reactions in which three or more reactants react simultaneously in a single pot. As a result, there is less solvent waste, less time, and less environmental impact as compared to a step-by-step reaction [2]. The auxiliary step economy, high coupling, and structural diversity of the resulting product make this green approach a heavy-duty tool for the synthesis of biologically active molecules, with applications in heterocycles, catalysts, antioxidant compounds, sanitizers, and copolymers on a large scale. Components in MCRs can either assemble in linear form or undergo further cyclization to generate complex compounds by combining simple building blocks, depending on the reactivity of chemical entities and the reaction conditions [3]. Over 300 distinct scaffolds constructed from MCRs are described in the scientific literature, showing a highly varied spectrum of chemistry [4]. A. Strecker reported the first MCR in 1850, which used a multicomponent approach to synthesise α-amino acids. In which, aldehydes, hydrogen cyanide, and ammonia were the main substrate components of their process [5]. Thereafter, several reports evolved MCRs in several ways including total synthesis of biologically active natural products and drug molecules.

Considering the relevance of MCRs in chemical education, MCRs are widely used in organic analysis and industry due to their ability to reach sophisticated heterocyclic structures in a single step. They have the advantage of protecting the majority of atoms from the building blocks that are provided within the product, allowing for the creation of libraries of compounds at a low cost. Reactions like Strecker, Hantzsch, Biginelli, Mannich, and Passerini are well known remarkable examples of multicomponent reactions. The synthesis of telaprevir, an HCV protease inhibitor that was recently approved by the FDA, is a perfect representation of MCRs in medicine. Formaldehyde is a highly versatile component with multiple applications in industry such as resins, polymers, paints, and adhesives, but its utility is carcinogenic; nevertheless, with the use of MCRs, we may use it in minimal manufacturing with maximum utility [6]. Among the most significant discoveries in this field is the Ugi four-component reaction (Ugi 4CR). Ugi-4CR is utilised to create macro-cyclic compounds, which has led to the development of several potential drug discoveries. In recent years, the Ugi 4CR has gone through significant changes, including the alteration of one of the components and the addition of a linkage between them. Analogues of philanthotoxin, for example, have been synthesised using the Ugi reaction and have been shown to inhibit various types of ionotropic receptors in the nervous system [7].

In our present work, taurine-catalyzed MCR method has been considered and for the first time synthesis of substituted dihydropyrano [2,3-c]pyrazoles utilizing MCR catalyzed by taurine has been achieved. Polypyranopyrazole is a well-known pyranopyrazole that has a unique 4H-pyran ring fused with pyrazole and is well-known for its health benefits. So far, we've designed and synthesised numerous new congeners belonging to pyranopyrazole with Spiro indole, isonicotinamide, and indole moieties, as well as evaluated them for biological applications [8]. Given what has been discovered so far in MCRs, it is certain to be a hotspot for future discoveries [9]. Material science is another application where MCR's full promise has yet to be realised [10]. The precision of macromolecular structures is strongly related to the design of next-generation materials. MCRs, more than any other device, assist in achieving this goal. It's the most effective strategy to tackle green synthesis in the lab.

[1] K. Nicolaou, “The emergence of the structure of the molecule and the art of its synthesis,” Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 131–146, 2013.
[2] S. Zhi, X. Ma, and W. Zhang, “Consecutive multicomponent reactions for the synthesis of complex molecules,” Org. Biomol. Chem., vol. 17, no. 33, pp. 7632–7650, 2019.
[3] C. G. Neochoritis, T. Zarganes-Tzitzikas, K. Katsampoxaki-Hodgetts, and A. Dömling, “Multicomponent Reactions:‘Kinderleicht,’” J. Chem. Educ., vol. 97, no. 10, pp. 3739–3745, 2020.
[4] C. Cimarelli, “Multicomponent reactions,” Molecules, vol. 24, no. 13, p. 2372, 2019.
[5] K. Harada, “Asymmetric Synthesis of α-Amino-acids by the Strecker Synthesis,” Nature, vol. 200, no. 4912, pp. 1201–1201, 1963.
[6] C. Liu, W. Huang, J. Zhang, Z. Rao, Y. Gu, and F. Jérôme, “Formaldehyde in multicomponent reactions,” Green Chem., vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 1447–1465, 2021.
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[8] G. Mali et al., “Design, Synthesis, and Biological Evaluation of Densely Substituted Dihydropyrano[2,3- c ]pyrazoles via a Taurine-Catalyzed Green Multicomponent Approach,” ACS Omega, vol. 6, no. 45, pp. 30734–30742, Nov. 2021, doi: 10.1021/acsomega.1c04773.
[9] A. C. Boukis, K. Reiter, M. Frölich, D. Hofheinz, and M. A. Meier, “Multicomponent reactions provide key molecules for secret communication,” Nat. Commun., vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2018.
[10] R. Afshari and A. Shaabani, “Materials functionalization with multicomponent reactions: state of the art,” ACS Comb. Sci., vol. 20, no. 9, pp. 499–528, 2018.

With great process change, comes great communication responsibility!

Deepak Kumar Saxena

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Business process may be understood as a series of steps to complete an organizational task. Organization life is full of, let me correct it, is constituted by business processes. From the hiring to the firing process, from the vendor selection to the procurement process, from the manufacturing to the packaging process, from the lead generation to the sales process, and from the dispatch to the transportation process, business processes form the lifeblood of modern organizations. At the same time, irrespective of the type of organization, manufacturing or service, information travels alongside business processes [1]. Hence, organizations often implement enterprise-wide information systems to capture and disseminate business process information [2].

However, business processes and their associated information requirements do not remain static. Oftentimes, the process needs to be changed because it has become too cumbersome or a better technology is available to sidestep some of the earlier tasks. Consider, for instance, the process of issuing payments by individuals. Earlier, we used to keep cash at hand to be able to make payments. Then came the debit card and ATM machines from which we used to draw cash (many of us still do!). More recently, we have now moved to making digital payments via mobile payment interfaces like BHIM [3]. Similarly, organizations also make certain changes in their business, and by extension, information processes [1,2]. For instance, an enterprise system may hugely simplify the inventory management process by automated ordering based on the safety stock settings.

By nature, such business processes and associated processes cut across organizational hierarchy, departments, and sometimes even beyond organizational boundaries [4]. Hence, coordination and communication becomes a key requirement in managing such changes. In our case study, conducted with Prof. Joe McDonagh of Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), one such business process change was examined [5]. The process change in question, undertaken by the National Blood Transfusion Services (hereafter mentioned as NBTS), refers to a change in the product labeling system for blood and associated products.

Okay, let’s go back a little to develop an understanding of the organization and the business process. NBTS is the national agency that collects blood from the nationwide donors. It then tests the blood for possible infections and discards if found infectious. The rest of the good samples are then processed to get various components of the blood, primarily red cells, platelets, and plasma [6]. The rationale for getting these components separately is that the patients often have a deficit of only one component. Hence instead of transfusing whole blood, only the relevant component is sufficient. NBTS supplies these blood products to the nationwide hospitals on a request basis. Figure 1 shows the business process followed in this regard.

From the patient safety perspective, it is crucial that the whole process is traceable from the blood collection to final transfusion. For this purpose, NBTS earlier used an internally developed barcode-based system for the labeling of its product. Much like your Amazon delivery, the label is scanned at various touchpoints to track its flow. From a standardization perspective, NBTS decided to bring in a blood labeling system called ISBT-128 (see Figure 2 for a sample label), that would make its label readable not only across the nation, but also across the globe [7]. When it decided to bring this process change, it informed the hospitals about the proposed change in March 2014. The hospitals were needed to be informed since they should be able to read the labels to port data to their information systems.

However, there was a series of communications breakdowns that seriously hampered the change process. Since the information appearing on the new labels comes from various departments within NBTS, no person or a single department had complete information on the labeling content. For the same reason, there was nobody willing to take the business process ownership. At the end, the IT team took the initiative and configured the label. The configuration and testing process took around 15 months, and finished (IT team thought so) in May 2015. NBTS wrote to the hospitals that they are going live with the new labeling system by June and hoped that hospitals are ready to embrace the process change.

And all hell broke loose! Since there was no communication after March 2014, many hospitals were under the impression that the labeling project had been shelved. Moreover, in the meantime, they had commenced an implementation of a Laboratory Information Systems (to be shared by all hospitals) without any reference to the labeling system. Caught unaware, the hospitals went to the sector regulator with their concerns in relation to the adequacies (or rather inadequacies) for the proposed process change. Moreover, many departments within NBTS also flagged that some configuration decisions need to be revisited. This resulted in a lot of rework on the labels, and the hospitals were given a three months extension, along with supporting documents on testing the new labeling scheme. Moreover, NBTS also had to retain a part of the old labeling scheme so that the hospitals that could not move on with the new labels, could still be part of the process and keep using their existing systems. Finally, the project went live in September 2015, with the majority of the hospitals still using the old labeling system.

So what went wrong? To answer this question, we used Socio-Technical Systems (STS) theory to analyze the project. A socio-technical system may be understood as consisting of three levels – work-system, organizational, and macrosocial [8]. A work-system refers to the people and equipment that directly support the business process in question. In the NBTS case, it refers to the new labeling system, people supplying the relevant information going into the labels, and the people making configuration decisions. Organizational system refers to the processes and people, not directly connected to the project, but working at the level of the organization. In our case, if refers to the NBTS itself. Finally, macrosocial systems include the sectoral and institutional actors that have an influence on the organization. In the case of NBTS, these macrosocial actors included the Department of Health, and the Health Products Regulatory Authority.

In our analysis, we found communications breakdowns at all three levels. At the work-system level, there was inadequate communication even among the IT and the corresponding departments when configuration decisions were being made. This lack of communication also reflects in non-communication of any configurational decision with the hospitals prior to May 2015. At the organizational level, there was no general communication either within the NBTS (besides the project team or top leadership), or with the hospitals in relation to the project status. Finally, there was no communication with the Department of Health or the Health Project Regulatory Authority in relation to the project vision or planning.

The case highlights a number of aspects. First, successful process change requires a high level of internal and external communication. This communication should not be confined only to the people directly working in the project, i.e. at the work-system level, but also to other actors at the organization and the macrosocial level. At the work-system level, communication is required to determine and convey the content of change; at the organizational level, communication is required to drive the change; finally, communication at the macrosocial level is required to manage the context of the change. This requires a multilevel communication approach during a business process change.

Hence, to paraphrase Uncle Ben from the Spiderman movies (or Aunt May, if you are referring to the latest trilogy), with great process change, comes great communication responsibility!

References:-

1.	1. Hammer, M. (1990). Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate. Harvard Business Review, 68(4), pp. 104-112. Available at: https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate.
2.	2. Davenport, T. H. (1998). Putting the enterprise into the enterprise system. Harvard Business Review, 76(4), pp. 121-131. Available at: https://hbr.org/1998/07/putting-the-enterprise-into-the-enterprise-system.
3.	3. Sharma, S. (2021). 2021 India Mobile Payments Market Report. S&P Global. Available at: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/documents/2021-india-mobile-payments-market-report.pdf.
4.	4. Hall, R. (2002). Enterprise resource planning systems and organizational change: transforming work organization? Strategic Change, 11(5), pp. 263-270.
5.	5. Saxena, D., & McDonagh, J. (2021). Communication breakdowns during business process change projects–Insights from a sociotechnical case study. International Journal of Project Management. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2021.11.011.
6.	6. Pietersz, R. N., & van der Meer, P. F. (2015). Processing and storage of blood components: strategies to improve patient safety. International Journal of Clinical Transfusion Medicine, 3, pp. 55-64.
7.	7. ICCBBA. (2020). ISBT 128 For Blood Components – An Introduction. ICCBBA. Available at: https://www.iccbba.org/tech-library/upload-docs-here/isbt-128-basics/introductory-booklets/in-003-isbt-128-for-blood-components-an-introduction.pdf
8.	8. Trist, E. L. (1981). The evolution of socio-technical systems. Toronto: Ontario Quality of Working Life Centre.

Hardware Accelerators for Deep Learning-based Healthcare Applications

Binod Kumar and Jai Narayan Tripathi

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Abstract—The current generation of big data together with significant advancements in the computational platforms provides multiple opportunities for a very wide range of predictions in different kinds of applications. These predictions have been possible because of successful research in machine learning methodologies over the last decade. A major portion of these methodologies belong to the deep learning (DL) techniques that have matured progressively and improved in accuracy matching to the human level. Healthcare and biomedical applications are a couple of major segments where the DL algorithms have shown tremendous opportunities for different tasks viz biometric authentication, test diagnosis, prognosis and treatment recom- mendation strategies. In this article, a review on the successful implementations of DL-assisted hardware systems is presented. Index Terms—Deep Learning, Hardware Accelerator, Energy Efficiency, Digital Healthcare, Security.

I. INTRODUCTION
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has raised some serious concerns related to healthcare in spite of a digital and con- nected world. The pandemic has led to an increase in the demands of processing different medical-related tasks such as imaging analysis and treatment strategy prediction in a remote manner. This has the potential for bringing scalability to digital health solutions and similar government initiatives across the globe. Due to the significant advancements in Deep Learning (DL), artificial intelligence-based solutions have emerged as effective alternatives to the traditional healthcare techniques. With the help of DL, precise, personalized and proactive recommendations [1]–[5] can be provided to the patients to lessen the workloads of healthcare personnel.

Fig. 1 presents smart healthcare deployment in the context of different computing paradigms. For processing of data belonging to healthcare applications, hardware accelerators have gained rapid attention. Hardware accelerators can be defined as the specialized hardware devices which execute certain computing tasks which are offloaded by the application to perform some supreme task. They can be either utilized at the end-stage (where the patients/users are located) or at the nearby processing centers (in the edge computing paradigm). The analysis of patient test reports can be done with the help of CPU/GPU clusters (in the cloud computing paradigm) at the cost of latency and large computational power. Inference of the medical condition and treatment strategies can be done at the edge nodes with the help of these accelerators. Running the classification tasks on generalized computing hardware is not performance efficient in comparison to the dedicated accelerators.

The authors are with Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Jodhpur.

Fig. 1. Smart Healthcare Deployment and the required computing Infrastruc- ture

The healthcare applications such as different kinds of imag- ing analysis and a large range of classification tasks require a sufficient computational efficiency. The range of classification tasks typically includes heart-rate variability, respiratory sound classification, X-ray/brain-state classification, bowel sound segmentation, motor intention decoding, etc. Some of these ap- plications require less training and accuracy while others have stringent requirements of accuracy. Such requirements mainly depend on the end-usage scenario as well as the available computing facility e.g. a high accuracy provided by the com- putational engines can lead to monitoring without the need for human intervention. Similarly, depending on the computation of the processed data, prediction of treatment strategies can be done. The analysis of different kinds of test reports such as Electrocardiography (ECG), Electroencephalography (EEG), Electromyography (EMG) and Photoplethysmography (PPG) require systems with enhanced computational performance.

II. HARDWARE ACCELERATOR FOR DL
The domain of DL applications has been expanding at a very fast pace with improvement in network size, reduction in training time period and use of multi-dimensional data used for the training. This makes the development of application specific hardware for DL acceleration very demanding. DL can be used to facilitate the prognosis [6], diagnosis [7], predication [8], monitoring [1], [9] and treatment [10]. These are motivated by the potential of the DL to exceed the human precision and expertise when it comes to the analysis of medical data [11], [12] .

While there have been tremendous breakthroughs in the ar- chitectures of deep learning models for different healthcare and biological applications, the majority of computationally expensive deep networks are trained using GPUs or are trained remotely in data centres. Data centers often necessitates access to expensive cloud computing services, which not only drains a lot of power, but also risk data privacy. This is in contrast to the effective execution of the DL based tasks at the edge on a growing number of healthcare point of care (PoC) systems and IoT devices. The ability to relocate computation away from the cloud is enabled by edge learning and inference techniques. This is essential for extremely sensitive medical data as well as for offline functioning. To make intelligent health monitoring more realistic and economical for integration it into practical day to day life, edge-based computing must combine small size, high throughput, and low-power processing at a low cost. Different architectures/computational platforms and memory device types that are probable candidates for accelerator im- plementation are shown in Figure 2.

Fig. 2. Architectures and memory choices in DL model implementation

1) ASIC Accelerators: CMOS based ASIC edge accelera- tors are used for enabling the DL computation on PoC and IoT devices. In recent years, the market for dedicated accelerators and microprocessor chips for facilitating DNNs has expanded rapidly. The accelerators, designed for generic DNNs, may easily implement portable smart DL-based healthcare IoT and PoC systems for processing medical imaging or sequential medical data types like EEG and ECG. It is important to mention that the majority of existing accelerators are designed for CNN inference, with only a few including for RNN acceleration [13]–[15].

2) FPGA Accelerators: FPGAs are integrated circuits de- signed to be re-programmable using hardware descriptive lan- guage. The fact that FPGAs are re-programmable distinguish them from ASICs, which are designed to perform specific design tasks. For medical applications such as diagnostic imaging, electromedical, therapeutics, and healthcare equip- ment, FPGA is a flexible, low-risk element for successful system design which provides cost reduction while providing value-added differentiating capabilities with long life [16]. FPGAs help in achieving better performance and accelerate highly complex algorithms like neural network computation as compared to the micro-controller [17], [18].

Fig. 3. Challenges in ML accelerator design implementation

the FPGA may operate with their own external memory and use the link to memories of each other. The NN accelerator is implemented on the FPGA portion in the majority of designs, and the accelerator is controlled by a software from the host side. Some of the successful implementation of FPGA-based DL accelerators for bio-medical application available are : • ECG monitoring [25]. • Realtime mass-spectrometry data analysis for cancer de- tection [26]. • In [27], a FPGA based BCI is developed, in which a deep

Previously, FPGAs were primarily employed for inference tasks [19]–[21] and in certain situations, training DNNs using reduced-precision data [22] or hardware-friendly techniques [23]. A CPU host and an FPGA portion are commonly included in an FPGA-based neural network accelerator system. A PCIe connection is used to link a FPGA chip to a host PC/server. The host and the FPGA are integrated in the same chip or packaging on SoC platforms (such as the Xilinx Zynq Series) and Intel HARPv2 systems [24]. Both the host and neural network is used to reconstruct ECog signals.

FPGAs are expected to deliver >10 times the energy-delay efficiency than the state-of-the-art GPUs for accelerating the DL by using hardware-software co-design and specialised algorithmic design methodologies [19]. This is critical for the development of portable and dependable healthcare mobile apps. FPGA design, on the other hand, is more difficult than high-level designs for DL accelerators, and it necessitates the use of professional engineers and more powerful tools, such as those provided by GPU suppliers.

Apart from the concerns of power efficiency discussed above, dependability and security issues are also important challenges for accelerator design (Figure 3).

III. CONCLUSION:
Over the years, Deep Learning has enabled significant advancements in different fields such as computer vision, nat- ural language processing, autonomous driving and automatic surveillance. Healthcare and bio-medical applications have also been tremendously benefited by continued enhancement of deep learning (DL) techniques over the last decade. This article comprehensively presented the usage of DL-enabled application-specific hardware accelerators for healthcare and biomedical applications.

References:-

[1]	P. Sundaravadivel et al. Smart-log: A deep-learning based automated nutrition monitoring system in the iot. IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, 64(3):390–398, 2018.
[2]	B. Shi et al. Prediction of occult invasive disease in ductal carcinoma in situ using deep learning features. Journal of the American College of Radiology, 15(3):527–534, 2018.
[3]	W. Zhu et al. The application of deep learning in cancer prognosis prediction. Cancers, 12(3):603, 2020.
[4]	C. Zhang et al. Optimizing fpga-based accelerator design for deep convolutional neural networks. New York, NY, USA, 2015. Association for Computing Machinery.
[5]	Z. Liu et al. Throughput-optimized fpga accelerator for deep con- volutional neural networks. ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS), 10(3):1–23, 2017.
[6]	W. Zhu et al. The application of deep learning in cancer prognosis prediction. Cancers, 12(3):603, 2020.
[7]	X. Liu et al. A comparison of deep learning performance against health-care professionals in detecting diseases from medical imaging: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The lancet digital health, 1(6):e271–e297, 2019.
[8]	B. Shi et al. Prediction of occult invasive disease in ductal carcinoma in situ using deep learning features. Journal of the American College of Radiology, 15(3):527–534, 2018.
[9]	V. Jindal. Integrating mobile and cloud for ppg signal selection to monitor heart rate during intensive physical exercise. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems, pp. 36–37, 2016.
[10]	F. Liu et al. Mr-based treatment planning in radiation therapy using a deep learning approach. Journal of applied clinical medical physics, 20(3):105–114, 2019.
[11]	S. M. McKinney et al. International evaluation of an ai system for breast cancer screening. Nature, 577(7788):89–94, 2020.
[12]	A. Esteva et al. Dermatologist-level classification of skin cancer with deep neural networks. nature, 542(7639):115–118, 2017.
[13]	D. Shin et al. Dnpu: An energy-efficient deep-learning processor with heterogeneous multi-core architecture. IEEE Micro, 38(5):85–93, 2018.
[14]	J. Lee et al. Unpu: An energy-efficient deep neural network accelerator with fully variable weight bit precision. IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 54(1):173–185, 2018.
[15]	S. Yin et al. A high energy efficient reconfigurable hybrid neural network processor for deep learning applications. IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, 53(4):968–982, 2017.
[16]	Y. Wei et al. A review of algorithm & hardware design for ai-based biomedical applications. IEEE transactions on biomedical circuits and systems, 14(2):145–163, 2020.
[17]	A. Page et al. Utilizing deep neural nets for an embedded ecg-based biometric authentication system. In 2015 IEEE biomedical circuits and systems conference (BioCAS), pp. 1–4. IEEE, 2015.
[18]	G. Franco et al. Fpga-based muscle synergy extraction for surface emg gesture classification. In 2017 IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference (BioCAS), pp. 1–4. IEEE, 2017.
[19]	K. Guo et al. [dl] a survey of fpga-based neural network inference accelerators. ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS), 12(1):1–26, 2019.
[20]	C. Lammie et al. Low-power and high-speed deep fpga inference engines for weed classification at the edge. IEEE Access, 7:51171–51184, 2019.
[21]	M. Carreras et al. Optimizing temporal convolutional network inference on fpga-based accelerators. IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems, 10(3):348–361, 2020.
[22]	C. Lammie et al. Training progressively binarizing deep networks using fpgas. In 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), pp. 1–5. IEEE, 2020.
[23]	C. Lammie and M. R. Azghadi. Stochastic computing for low-power and high-speed deep learning on fpga. In 2019 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), pp. 1–5. IEEE, 2019.
[24]	P. K. Gupta. Accelerating datacenter workloads. In 26th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), volume 2017, pp. 20, 2016.
[25]	M. Wess et al. Neural network based ecg anomaly detection on fpga and trade-off analysis. In 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), pp. 1–4. IEEE, 2017.
[26]	A. Sanaullah et al. Real-time data analysis for medical diagnosis using fpga-accelerated neural networks. BMC bioinformatics, 19(18):19–31, 2018.
[27]	R. R. Shrivastwa et al. An fpga-based brain computer interfacing using compressive sensing and machine learning. In 2018 IEEE computer society annual symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI), pp. 726–731. IEEE, 2018.

High performance strain sensors for vehicle health monitoring

Shrutidhara Sarma

Research Snippets

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Fatal flight accidents occur primarily due to either loss of control or system/component failure while airborne. The consequential delays in subsequent flights due to aircraft technical issues enhance the cost of this disruption. Integrated vehicle health monitoring (IVHM) is a concept that allows us to shift towards condition-based maintenance from scheduled maintenance by monitoring various aspects of vehicles with the help of appropriate sensors and software. This means not taking the aircraft out while it is successfully generating revenue. One of the major aspects of IVHM is to monitor the structural integrity of aerospace, defense, or transport structures to address the early detection of deformations and potential damage. This is traditionally done by the inefficient way of artificially bonding piezoelectric transducers (PZTs) to structures that don’t ensure consistent and reliable performance. Besides, the sensors are expensive, inherently rigid, and brittle, and the associated signal wires introduce significant additional weight. This limits their usage in systems undergoing large deformation, such as a morphing wing. And although flexible printed sensors have made some advancements in this regard, the viscoelasticity of resin materials used in printable inks affects their performance and stability. This requires innovative implementation of advanced sensors and materials that enable accurate, active, and embedded sensing in extreme environments without adding significant aircraft weight.

Fig. 1: Aircraft smart skin is a concept within IVHM[1].

At the FERN (Flexible Sensors from nanocomposites) lab, we do in-depth analysis to optimize the electrical and mechanical properties of nanocomposites by carefully considering trade-offs to develop a large area, stretchable strain sensors with superior sensing properties, applicable for IVHM applications. The research is usually carried out on two major fronts: 1. By developing novel nanocomposite materials that respond to external stimuli 2. By tuning the design and structure of the developed sensors

The former focus on the development of nanocomposites of exceptional piezoresistivity that can overcome the limits of traditional strain sensors, by gaining a fundamental understanding of factors that influence piezoresistance in nanocomposites through their preparation and characterization. Here, parametric variation of factors under control, such as growth conditions, nanocomposite composition, structure, etc., is done, and samples are analyzed using standard characterization techniques of X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Raman Scattering, Tensile test, etc. Nanomaterials are used to exploit their peculiar charge transport phenomena at the nanoscale, and appropriate metals are combined to utilize the reversible piezoresistance attributed to the formation of cracks that closes upon releasing of strain [2].

The latter deals with materials that exhibit different structures when looked at different length scales. Take the example of the Eiffel tower, which, as a whole, is one big structure composed of iron but is composed of smaller diagonal girders that are tens of meters long. Look closely, and these diagonal girders again comprise smaller girders whose lengths are of the order of meters. This way if we keep going further, we reach the lattice structure down on the Angstrom scale (10-10 meters!). This hierarchy in structure plays a pivotal role in determining the bulk properties of the material. Similarly, a hierarchically microstructured sensing film can show enhanced sensitivity to force/strain/pressure due to sharp contact edges generated by the extra voids created within the microstructure.

Fig. 2: Influence of hierarchical microstructures in determining bulk properties [3] [4]

References:-

1.	Y. Wang, S. Hu, T. Xiong, Y. Huang, and L. Qiu, “Recent progress in aircraft smart skin for structural health monitoring,” Struct. Heal. Monit., vol. 0, no. 0, pp. 1–28, 2021.
2.	S. Sarma et al., “Layer by layer deposition of alternate carbon nanotubes and Ni films for efficient multilayer thin film temperature gauges,” J. Phys. D. Appl. Phys., vol. 52, no. 9, p. 095104, Jan. 2019.
3.	“Nanotechnology and the concept of friction - the effects of materials’ hierarchical structure.” [Online]. Available: https://www.nanowerk.com/nanotechnology-and-the-concept-of-friction-6.php. [Accessed: 17-Mar-2022].
4.	C. L. Choong et al., “Highly stretchable resistive pressure sensors using a conductive elastomeric composite on a micropyramid array,” Adv. Mater., vol. 26, no. 21, pp. 3451–3458, Jun. 2014.

Extending the Flight Range of Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAVs) Using Autonomous Charging Technique Based on Resonant Inductive Wireless Power Transfer Principle

Dr. Kunwar Aditya

Innovation Gallery

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Thanks to the recent development in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, UAVs these days can take-off, land, as well as navigate unpredictable complex terrain without any human intervention [1]-[2]. However, UAVs are power hungry machine as they have to generate lift force at all times to move around for which they require high amount of electrical power, consequently they have short flight-range. For the most commercial UAVs, the average battery life is about 20-30 minutes after which it needs to be recharged or replaced, thus severely affecting the performance over an area of interest [3]-[4]. Usually, a battery swapping technique or plug in charging technique is used for replacing or replenishing the discharged battery. However, a drone cannot be fully autonomous unless its charging is also free from human intervention. This has prompted researchers around the world to investigate the possibility of using wireless charging techniques based on Near Field Transmission techniques such as Inductive Power Transfer (IPT), capacitive power transfer (CPT) and Resonant Inductive Power Transfer (RIPT) system; and Far field Transmission techniques such as wireless power transfer using Laser, and microwaves. Among these only RIPT based power transfer can truly match the performance of a plug-in charger [5].

Figure 1. Block diagram of RIPT based wireless charger for UAVs

Figure 1 shows a conceptual block diagram of RIPT system for autonomous charging of UAVs. Transmitter part of the charger is installed at the base station where as receiver is installed on the UAV. Input of the transmitter is connected to the mains through an EMI filter to mitigate the grid-side harmonics, this is followed by an AC-DC Power Factor Correction pre-regulator to draw power at unity power factor and provide regulated DC link voltage to the high-frequency inverter stage. Due to the presence of a large air-gap between the transmitter and the receiver coil, magnetic coupling is very poor. To compensate poor coupling, both base-side and UAV-side coils are connected to a network of capacitors [6]. Energy is transferred to the UAV through the flux generated in the air gap by the transmitter coil current. Finally, the voltage thus received is rectified so as to make it exploitable by the on-board batteries. A communication interface which enables the control algorithm for charging the batteries as well as a coil detection system are also integral part of the RIPT based wireless charger [4].

Considerable progress has been made in the field of RIPT based wireless power transfer. However, there are issues which still need to be addressed such as: Weight of the coil, Coil detection system, high power density converter and safety from exposure to electromatic field. As the receiver is installed underneath the UAVs, it is desirable to have a very light weight receiver coil which doesn’t add to the weight of drone significantly. Weight of the onboard electronics could be further reduced by adopting wide-bandgap devices instead of conventional semiconductor devices. Another key challenge for successful implementation of autonomous wireless charging system is a precise coil-detection system which can assist the drone in detecting the charging transmitter coil. Foreign object detection and an electromagnetic shielding need special attention for safeguarding the living beings from health risk caused by exposure to high frequency electromagnetic flux. Last but not the least, a firmware to facilitate the charging process as well as to ensure the safety of UAV against the theft or hacking needs to be an integral part of charging system. Figure 2 shows a conceptual diagram of autonomous operation of the UAV.

Figure 2. A concept art for autonomous operation of drone for long distance operation.

The main goal of the Author is to contribute to the growing interest in autonomous UAVs. In particular, objective is to develop an autonomous wireless charger using RIPT principles which will allow the UAV to recharge its battery pack without any human intervention.

References:
[1] D. Wang, P. Hu, J. Du, P. Zhou, T. Deng and M. Hu, "Routing and Scheduling for Hybrid Truck-Drone Collaborative Parcel Delivery with Independent and Truck-Carried Drones," in IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 6, no. 6, pp. 10483-10495, Dec. 2019,
[2] A. V. Savkin and H. Huang, "Range-Based Reactive Deployment of Autonomous Drones for Optimal Coverage in Disaster Areas," in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, vol. 51, no. 7, pp. 4606-4610, July 2021.
[3] P. K. Chittoor, B. Chokkalingam and L. Mihet-Popa, "A Review on UAV Wireless Charging: Fundamentals, Applications, Charging Techniques and Standards," in IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 69235- 69266, 2021.
[4] M. Lu, M. Bagheri, A. P. James and T. Phung, "Wireless Charging Techniques for UAVs: A Review, Reconceptualization, and Extension," in IEEE Access, vol. 6, pp. 29865-29884, 2018.
[5] K. Aditya, “Design and implementation of an inductive power transfer system or wireless charging of future electric transportation,” Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. Ontario Inst. Technol., Oshawa, ON, Canada, 2016.
[6] K. Aditya and S. S. Williamson, “A Review of Optimal Conditions for Achieving Maximum Power Output and Maximum Efficiency for a Series-Series Resonant Inductive Link,” in IEEE Trans. On Transportation Electrification, Vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 303-311, May 2016.

Technologically Modified Information and its deep impact

Chhanda Chakraborti

In Focus

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Digital information, and digital information technologies, are now practically all-pervasive in our lives. In our personal and professional lives, we consume data voraciously, and manage, use, reuse, create and disseminate data continuously via the internet and various ICT devices. This has led some scholars to develop a concept called the Information Society (credited to Bell (1973), Machlup (1962)). In contrast to an industrial society, an information society is a post-industrial society. Instead of the fossil fuels and steam power which an industrial society survives on, the information society thrives on knowledge work and information. It engages knowledge workers by the millions, and its members remain interconnected mostly through the internet and information technology devices.

Immersed as we are in social communication and data, it is time to specifically mention some of the perils of swimming in the ocean of information. One such tangible threat is from the technologically modified information (TMI). The TMI may be simply understood as any information, which could be text, image or a video, which modified by digital editing and related technology.

Perhaps we are all familiar with the image editing technology which is now easily available on the phone, laptop and other devices. With the use of such technology, images are routinely retouched and modified by even common users before uploading in their social media platforms. The modified image, however, is an example of a TMI. Similarly, when a digital twin of a heritage object, which is withered with time, is technologically modified so that museum-goers can enjoy it in its original glory, we are looking at a TMI.

The point is that TMI as such is not a threat. In fact, as long as the use of TMI remains within the ambit of social decorum and ethics, we may enjoy various benefits from TMI.

Sometimes, TMI is spread and made viral because the receiver of the TMI forwarded it without verifying its truth. A common example would be what is known as misinformation. Misinformation is false or inaccurate information which is nonetheless presented and spread as a fact. For example, we may remember that in the social media and popular messenger app during the initial years of Corona pandemic (2019-2020), there was a deluge of misinformation about the corona virus and the protective measures against it. The volume of misinformation was such that WHO (WHO, 2021) termed it the Corona Infodemic, a parallel pandemic of misinformation, and had to engage in a collaborative effort to report the misinformation. Nowadays, one need not be an expert or a journalist to create and disseminate content online. Laypeople consume all kinds of information, and as some studies indicate (Sundar & Nass, 2001), they prefer the misinformation over the professional, real news sources.

However, not all such technological modification of information or their dissemination is innocent. As the saying goes, for every technology, there always is the possibility of misuse and abuse. And sometimes, TMI is used for malefic purposes. Deliberately, biased or false narratives, or doctored images, are cooked up to deceive, to mislead, to mobilize, or to demoralize, or even to incite, the gullible people. This is known as disinformation. It intentionally takes advantage of the unsuspecting gullibility of the end-users and manipulates their belief systems.

Fake news may be viewed as an example of disinformation. Fake news is manufactured and modified news, which looks authentic but is completely fabricated new. It is purposely made sensational or emotional to appeal to the audience. Now, the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) based tools, data-driven Deep Learning approaches, can be trained to automatically create and add attributes to the TMI images and videos in a more advanced and sophisticated manner. As a consequence, the deepfakes have emerged as a new category of a particularly challenging disinformation, which are extremely difficult to differentiate from the real content. A deepfake is a combination of the words deep learning and fake, in which a person or a scene in an image or in a video is replaced or altered technologically to create very convincing but totally fabricated audio, text or videos.

Pic. 1 Deepfake Obama created along with fabricated speeches (Suwajanakorn, Seitz & Kemelmacher-Slizermann, 2017)

The threat from TMI as misinformation and disinformation, particularly from the Deepfake, is real, and should be a matter of societal concern for a variety of reasons. In the remaining part of this article, I shall mention a few of them.

Serious transgression of basic rights and common decency has already been evinced in the case of deepnude (Yeh, Chen, Tsai, and Wang, 2020), a deep generative app based on image-to-image translation algorithm, by which photos of people, of women and celebrities in particular, can be technologically manipulated to produce realistic nude pictures. Although the social furore against the app caused the makers to pull the app off the internet, many of the supporting GAN algorithms still exist.

Similarly, TMI in the form of misinformation and disinformation created with the specific purpose of a political propaganda to sway the voters’ opinions during a crucial election can be a serious menace for any democracy. In the wrong hands, it can be a very dangerous political tool. The point about propaganda is not entirely new. In history, we have ample examples of successful use of propaganda to gain political clout and credibility. Nazi propaganda machine was exceptionally efficient. However, an important point of distinction may be that at present the misinformation and disinformation campaigns can leverage digital technology and AI tools in such a way that the reach of the propaganda has now become phenomenal. Simultaneously, an entire country now can be in the grip of a TMI propaganda. For example, weeks before an election, in Myanmar, Burmese social media reportedly filled up with fake news spreading hatred against the Rohingya minorities (The Economist, 2020). Reportedly, fake news spread online has continued to adversely affect social peace and interreligious harmony in Bangladesh, and people suspect political gain behind such a move (Al-Zaman et al., 2020).

In the context of India, the disruptive potency of deepfake or any other advanced form of disinformation is easily imaginable, given the recorded instances of disruptive behavior based on fake news. The readers may remember an unfortunate spate of mob violence and lynching which were spurred by a spread of viral rumour via the popular messenger app Whatsapp in India (Mediros & Singh, 2020). The incidents were apparently catalyzed by a Whatsapp rumour that kidnappers would visit villages in India to nab children for some horrific purposes. As a result, several innocent people lost their lives by being brutally attacked by a furious mob. These incidences have gained the moniker the Indian Whatsapp lynchings. Viral fake news via whatsapp was also supposed to have led to distressing violence and mob lynching by the cow vigilantes (Mukherjee, 2020).

TMI in the form of misinformation and disinformation is also known to have deep psychological impact on people. Recent studies (Vaccari and Chadwick, 2020) suggest that deepfakes cause deep and longstanding uncertainty among people. This in turn reduces trust in facts and news obtained through social media, and in the long run may induce cynicism which undermines the foundation of a democratic society. Greene, Bradshaw, Houston & Murphy (2021) report that methods that involve deeper processing of misinformation result in more memory distortions in people.

Therefore, the overall conclusion of this article is that misuse and use with malicious intent of TMI poses a veritable threat to individual security and privacy, and to social peace and cohesion. Therefore, they require a cautious approach. Developing effective interventions against TMI of the misinformation and disinformation variety will depend not only on the technological countermeasures, but also on understanding the underlying cognitive and social factors.

References:
1. Al-Zaman, M. S., Sife, S. A., Sultana, M., Akbar, M., Ahona, K. T. S., & Sarkar, N. (2020). Social media rumors in Bangladesh. Journal of Information Science Theory and Practices, 8(3), 77–90.
2. Bell, D. (2019/1973). The coming of post-industrial society. In Social Stratification (pp. 805-817). Routledge. First published by Basic Books, 1973.
3. Machlup, F. (1962). The Production and Distribution of knowledge in the United States. Princeton University Press.
4. Medeiros, B & P. Singh. (2020). Addressing Misinformation on Whatsapp in India Through Intermediary Liability Policy, Platform Design Modification, and Media Literacy. Journal of Information Policy , 2020, Vol. 10, pp. 276-298.
5. Mukherjee, R. (2020). Mobile witnessing on WhatsApp: Vigilante virality and the anatomy of mob lynching. South Asian Popular Culture, 18(1), 79–101.
6. Sundar, S. S., Nass, C. (2001). Conceptualizing sources in online news. Journal of Communication, 51, 52-72.
7. Suwajanakorn, S, S.M. Seitz & I. Kemelmacher-Slizermann. (2017). Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 36 (4) , 95:1-95:13.
8. The Economist. (2020, October 22). In Myanmar, Facebook struggles with a deluge of disinformation. The Economist. October 22, 2020. Available at: https://www.economist.com/asia/2020/10/22/in-myanmar-facebook-struggles-with-a-deluge-of-disinformation
9. Veccari, C, & A. Chadwick. (2020). Deepfakes and Disinformation: Exploring the impact of Synthetic Political Video on Deception, Uncertainty and Trust in news. Social Media + Society, https://doi.org./10.1177/2056305120903408
10. World Health Organization (WHO). (2021). Fighting Information in the time of Covid-19: One click at a time. Available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/fighting-misinformation-in-the-time-of-covid-19-one-click-at-a-time [Last accssed on: April 21, 2022].
11. Yeh, C., Chen, H., Tsai, S., & Wang, S. (2020). Disrupting Image-Translation-Based DeepFake Algorithms with Adversarial Attacks. 2020 IEEE Winter Applications of Computer Vision Workshops (WACVW), 53-62.