Whose Glory?

The euphoria in India about the Nobel Prize in chemistry for 2009 being awarded to India-born, UK-based structural biologist Dr Venkatraman Ramakrishnan along with Dr Thomas Steitz of Yale University and Dr Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel is not at all justifiable. Let us not be emotional about the accident of birth. Credit goes not to the fact of Dr Ramakrishnan’s Indian origin, hence the connection, but to his own hard work and excellent research ambience provided by the institution he works in — the Cambridge-based MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He left India right after his BSc in physics to pursue higher studies and research in the US and UK. While being a fellow at California University, he switched over from physics to biology — mind the interdisciplinary flexibility allowed in world-class universities (how many Indian universities allow that?) that the likes of Dr Ramakrishnan would exploit to the hilt and help expand the knowledge horizon. We in India should rather rue the loss of talents like Dr Ramakrishnan to foreign institutions where they are provided with the best of facilities to excel in their chosen fields. Dr Ramakrishnan’s Nobel is an MRC Laboratory glory, despite the fact that we tend to bask in it and publicize it as our own achievement after years of failure to locate and nourish talents. Why must our scientists leave for foreign shores and help the countries they adopt add to their list of Nobel laureates? Why even after more than six decades of Independence have we failed to reverse the trend? THE SENTINEL