These days, Current Science features only guest editorials by invited contributors, and it's great to see my IISc colleagues being featured in this very exalted space. Here's a quick sample:
Prof. Rohini Godbole: Women in STEMM: involve the institutions.
E. Arunan: Borders in science and nations are artificial. Should we have borders within India?.
B. Ananthanarayan: Joy of discovery as a reason for pursuing a career in science.
The non-resident Indian scientist [Shreemanta Parida], appointed two years ago as chief executive officer of a government vaccine research programme, resigned last month and returned home to Berlin, saying India’s science bureaucracy had prevented him from working.
Scientists familiar with Parida’s plight say his 25-month stay in India is a tale of how an entrenched science bureaucracy stonewalled a newcomer, senior administrators failed to curb the harassment, and good intentions deteriorated into bitter acrimony.
There's a lot more on this train-wreck in G. Mudur's report in The Telegraph.
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Some observations:
Mudur's report reminded me of another very high-profile train wreck: the disastrous tenure of Nobel Prize winner Robert Laughlin at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. WSJ carried a detailed analysis of that episode by Nicholas Zamiska in May 2007 [linked in this post].
Way back in 2002, Prof. Shobo Bhattacharya, who was then a scientist at NEC Research Center in Princeton, New Jersey, was chosen to head the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. While Prof. Bhattacharya completed his full term with no untoward incident, his appointment was used by some bigwigs of Indian science establishment to tut-tut about the lack of home-grown science leaders in the next generation. Do read the article in Science [requires subscription, though]; it has some truly juicy quotes!
The article in Science, and the worthies behind those juicy quotes, received a stinging rebuke from Prof. P. Balaram through an editorial in Current Science.
Just a few days from now, Prof. Ashish Nanda of Harvard will take charge as Director of IIM-A [see his early views on his new job here and here.
Let's wish him luck!
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One final thought. Any resemblance between the contents of this post and these famous first lines in a textbook is purely coincidental!
“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the same work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.
-- David Goodstein, in States of Matter
Ritika Chopra (Mail Today) updates us on how the new IITs have been (not) shaping up.
Matthew Bailes at The Conversation: The Rise and Rise of the Science Politician.
LHC may have been built successfully, but according to Weinberg, it may very well be the last of its breed, because it's going to be almost impossible to get the kind of funding needed for the next (and much more powerful) accelerator or observatory. He comes to this conclusion based on his experience with physicists' failure in the 1990s to get adequate funding for their dream machine -- the Superconducting SuperCollider (SSC); the project was abandoned after spending some 2 billion dollars on it.
How about a funding model based on international cooperation and collaboration? He's pessimistic about this as well; he says, "We saw recently how a project to build a laboratory for the development of controlled thermonuclear power, ITER, was nearly killed by the competition between France and Japan to be the laboratory’s site."
All in all, not a good prognosis for Big Science. Here's an extract on how a combination of political rivals as well as scientific rivals (scientists who argued that the money is better spent on Small Science) helped kill the SSC project:
So in the next decade, physicists are probably going to ask their governments for support for whatever new and more powerful accelerator we then think will be needed. ...
That is going to be a very hard sell. My pessimism comes partly from my experience in the 1980s and 1990s in trying to get funding for another large accelerator.
[... snip, snip...]
What does motivate legislators is the immediate economic interests of their constituents. Big laboratories bring jobs and money into their neighborhood, so they attract the active support of legislators from that state, and apathy or hostility from many other members of Congress. Before the Texas site was chosen, a senator told me that at that time there were a hundred senators in favor of the SSC, but that once the site was chosen the number would drop to two. He wasn’t far wrong. We saw several members of Congress change their stand on the SSC after their states were eliminated as possible sites.
Another problem that bedeviled the SSC was competition for funds among scientists. Working scientists in all fields generally agreed that good science would be done at the SSC, but some felt that the money would be better spent on other fields of science, such as their own. It didn’t help that the SSC was opposed by the president-elect of the American Physical Society, a solid-state physicist who thought the funds for the SSC would be better used in, say, solid-state physics. I took little pleasure from the observation that none of the funds saved by canceling the SSC went to other areas of science.
An Indian 'experiment' from the 1990s is worth recalling for its resemblance to the shenanigans of a few Saudi universities. It is all the more remarkable since the institution that tried the experiment is now one of the top institutions in India.
The scientist who broke this story is Dr. S.R. Valluri, former director of the National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore. In an op-ed in The Hindu (dated 2 November 1995) entitled Whither Ethics in Science, Valluri questioned the ethics of various actions of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore. [I can't provide a direct link since The Hindu archives don't go so far back.] The op-ed criticized JNCASR (and its leadership) on several counts, but here are the parts that are relevant to the issue at hand:
Were it not for the serious nature of the implications, one can only observe with amusement the efforts of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) in Bangalore to project an image of instant excellence and achievement. The centre has been attempting to achieve this image of "making rapid strides" by identifying some scientists from other institutions as its honorary faculty, and including in its annual report (January '95) a list of their publications, without mentioning there itself, their places of full time employment and where the work was actually done, thus making them appear as if they are the centre's own achievements.
It is tantamount to a whole scientific institution being less than truthful in matters of science.[...] [T]his practice violates the very ethics and culture of science. ... By this practice the centre's own credentials have come under a cloud.
... One ... wonders how the scientists concerned could have countenanced the omission, in the listings in the centre's report, of their affiliations with their own parent organizations which have been nurturing them. This denial of the credit by the centre is less than fair.
To give them benefit of the doubt, we have to assume that the scientists concerned acquiesced without examining its implications. Such things are happening as the senior scientific community has not cared to give enough thought to evolving and putting into practice a self-regulating code of ethics for the practice, management and administration of science in India.
[Snip, snip, snip]
The JN Centre deserves all the financial support it needs for its full time staff to work inhouse purposefully. But flaunting borrowed finery and basking in reflected glory has unfortunate implications for the cause of science and even for their own image considering the reputation of the scientists who are associated with the centre. [...]
The op-ed goes into some detail about some of the other actions by JNCASR, which, as I said, need not concern us now. It drew a response from the late Prof. Raja Ramanna; since I have not read that letter, I'm not quite sure why he chose to get involved. But Valluri got a chance to reiterate his points in a follow-up letter (published in The Hindu on 28 November 1995). Here's the relevant part of his rebuttal:
... I stand by what I have said in my article. ... The clarifications given by Dr. Ramanna are extraneous to the points I have raised in my article.
I have specifically raised three questions in my article. One is directly concerned with ethics in science. In instances I am personally aware, the honorary faculty [at JNCASR] did mention their places of full time employment and did indicate their honorary association with the JNCASR, and did acknowledge the financial support that they received from it. the JNCASR, however, deleted all reference to the place of full time affiliation of its honorary faculty, while taking credit for their research by listing their publications in its Jan '95 annual report (pages 38 to 56). It could have been considered accidental and not taken seriously if it happened once or twice. But that it was deliberate is indicated by the fact that about 200 listings or more belong to this category. It even took credit for the work of at least one honorary fellow who did not receive any support and who did his work entirely in some other organization. By such a practice, while the JNCASR takes credit for such research, it implicitly denies the same to the parent institutions which have been really nurturing the honorary faculty, while they may have received some financial support from the JNCASR also. In matters of science, such practices are unethical, as credits in progress of science are built on historical records. If everybody indulges in this practice, chaos will result.
In both his original article and in his rebuttal to Ramanna's response, Valluri does not mention the name of the the man at the helm of JNCASR at that time: Prof. C.N.R. Rao. It was clear, however, that Valluri placed the responsibility for the ethical violations on JNCASR's leadership. When Prof. Rao's autobiographical memoirs -- Climbing the Limitless Ladder: A Life in Chemistry -- were published sometime ago, I was curious to see how he dealt with this dark episode in his career as a top scientific administrator. This is what I found on p. 92:
One or two scientists made personal attacks on me at that time ... Another criticism was that in one of the early reports of the Centre, the Academic Coordinator had also included the publications of some of the honorary professors. No one expects a new centre to become famous from papers of others, but the criticism was that the Centre was using the reputation of others to become famous instantaneously. All this was far from the truth. ... Fortunately for me, all my colleagues including Raja Ramanna came to my defence at that time. I also made sure that subsequent reports of the Centre did not list papers of honorary professors even if their research was supported by JNCASR.
I'll just state that Rao appears to have misread Valluri's critique as a "personal attack." Valluri was careful to point to specific acts of "omission and commission" with a view to forcing a course correction. That his criticism was right -- and stingingly so -- is proven beyond doubt by the fact that Rao "made sure that subsequent reports of the Centre did not list papers of honorary professors."
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All in all, this unholy experiment offers an excellent test to check if an institutional policy / action is right. The leader just has to ask, "Would it survive if Dr. Valluri decides to write an op-ed about it?"
Dyson reviews a couple of recent books on Richard Feynman -- a scientific biography by Lawrence Krauss and a comic-book biography by Jim Ottaviani, with art by Leland Myrick. Both get a very good rating from Dyson. Here's an excerpt on the essence -- 'the central theme' -- of Feynman's scientific work:
The central theme of Feynman’s work as a scientist was to explore a new way of thinking and working with quantum mechanics. The book succeeds in explaining without any mathematical jargon how Feynman thought and worked. This is possible because Feynman visualized the world with pictures rather than with equations. Other physicists in the past and present describe the laws of nature with equations and then solve the equations to find out what happens. Feynman skipped the equations and wrote down the solutions directly, using his pictures as a guide. Skipping the equations was his greatest contribution to science. By skipping the equations, he created the language that a majority of modern physicists speak. Incidentally, he created a language that ordinary people without mathematical training can understand. To use the language to do quantitative calculations requires training, but untrained people can use it to describe qualitatively how nature behaves.
Along the way, we learn the difference between the comic-book literary forms manga and gekiga:
... The genre of serious comic-book literature was highly developed in Japan long before it appeared in the West. The Ottaviani-Myrick book is the best example of this genre that I have yet seen with text in English. Some Western readers commonly use the Japanese word manga to mean serious comic-book literature. According to one of my Japanese friends, this usage is wrong. The word manga means “idle picture” and is used in Japan to describe collections of trivial comic-book stories. The correct word for serious comic-book literature is gekiga, meaning “dramatic picture.” The Feynman picture-book is a fine example of gekiga for Western readers.
After reading the previous post, my colleague Prof. U. Ramamurty sent me the link to this Science Watch listing of field-wise comparison of India's performance against the world average. It has quite a few surprises.
First, the unsurprising bit: India's average for citations per paper is smaller than the world average in all the fields.
The surprise is in the fields that come closest to the world average: Engineering (a deficit of 16 percent), Computer Science (20%) Materials Science (22%), Physics (22%) and Psychiatry / Psychology (33%) are at the top. We see a lot of biology-related fields (agriculture, medicine, biochemistry, microbiology) among those where India's average is less than half the world average.
Once again, this table represents a snapshot; it has no timelines and trends. The accompanying report has some (but only some) info that points to a positive trend in India's share in publications and citations:
... [S]ince 2000 [India's] output has increased from some 16,000 papers to 40,000, world share has risen from 2.2% to 3.4%, and citation impact has improved from 40% to nearly 60% of the world average. While that means that Indian research still underperforms in per-paper influence compared with other nations, the gains represented by these statistics are noteworthy.
For the 11-year period from 2000 to 2010, India accounted for 2.8% of all the scientific publications. What are the fields in which India "held the highest world share"?
... agricultural sciences (5.8%), chemistry (5.4%), materials science (4.8%), pharmacology (4.4%), plant and animal sciences (3.7%), physics (3.6%), engineering (3.3%), and geosciences (3.2%) – all higher than India’s overall 2.8% share.
Now that the India-Pakistan game is over, I guess we can get back to normal life. [My heart goes out to Misbah-ul-Haq, though. How can the same shit happen to the same man twice -- last man out against India in the final of the T-20 World Cup in 2007, and now this, the semi-final in this ODI World Cup].
While I'm not a big fan of scientometrics [mainly because their use is inappropriate in 'judging' the contributions of individuals], I do see their value in comparisons as long as (a) they are confined to single subject areas, and (b) they involve larger entities (such as departments, institutions, or even countries). With (a), we can avoid inappropriate comparisons -- e.g., between Courant Institute of Mathematical and Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory -- across fields with different citation practices. And with (b), we will have better and more meaningful statistics due to larger numbers of publications and citations.
Science Watch has a comparative table that meets these two conditions. So, go have a look at the ranking of Asia-Pacific Nations in Chemistry, 2000-2010.
The ranking is in terms of citations per paper; only Singapore (~citations per paper), Australia (12.5) and Japan (~12) do better than the world average (~11). Singapore, the Asia-Pacific topper, is actually ranked 12th in the world. India and China have about 7 citations per paper, and are ranked, respectively, 8th and 9th in Asia, and 38th and 39th in the world; however, China out-publishes India by a factor of nearly 3!
I still have a quibble. This report is a snapshot. I would much prefer an analysis of how the countries have done over the years; for example, the same data -- spanning 11 years, from 2000 to 2010 -- could have been analyzed for five consecutive 6-year periods, starting with 2000-05, all the way up to 2005-10. Such an analysis is better at describing which way each country is headed.
Of course, for policy makers, what would be even better is a sub-field level analysis, which could help identify a country's strong areas as well as weak areas.
Oh well, this is all we have for now.
In The Guardian: Titans of Science: David Attenborough meets Richard Dawkins: "We paired up Britain's most celebrated scientists to chat about the big issues: the unity of life, ethics, energy, Handel – and the joy of riding a snowmobile."
In Financial Times: Martin Wolf hosts an online forum on What is the Role of the State?
At Stumbling and Mumbling: The Pretense of Knowledge [Hat tip: Henry Farrell via Google Buzz]:
The problem here is that it is impossible to predict what research will be commercially useful. History is full of examples of businessmen and scientists - let alone politicians - utterly failing to anticipate commercial uses, for example:
“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable”
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value.”
"Radio has no future. Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax."
"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility."
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
“This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."
The Beatles sang some four decades ago, "All you need is love." Raghunath Mashelkar sings now, "All you need is irreverence."
I know it sounds all wrong. But nothing, it appears, is right about science in India. Mashelkar has diagnosed the missing ingredient: irreverence. And he has gone public with it in an editorial in Science.
Let's get real and frank here, shall we? The thesis that Indian scientists are held back because of lack of irreverence is amazingly self-serving, coming as it does from a man who led a massive organization for scientific research -- the CSIR -- for over a decade. It says, in effect, that Indian scientists have failed in spite of an abundance of water, electric power, intertubes, money, infrastructure, and yes, leaders.
If only they had a bit of irreverence ...
Tsk, Tsk!
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[If that link doesn't work, use the one at the end of this note at SciDev.net].
* * *
Let's turn to (some of) Mashelkar's arguments. Here's how he explains the origin of Indians' purported reverence:
The situation has deep roots in Indian culture and tradition. The ancient Sanskrit saying "baba vakyam pramanam" means "the words of the elders are the ultimate truth," thus condemning the type of irreverence inspired by the persistent questioning that is necessary for science.
The Indian educational system, which is textbook-centered rather than student-centered, discourages inquisitive attitudes at an early age. Rigid unimaginative curricula and examinations based on single correct answers further cement intolerance for creativity.
And the bureaucracy inherited from the time of British rule over-rides meritocracy.
Let's leave aside the silliness of blaming the Raj, even obliquely; the British left 60 years go. Let's also ignore the blame-the-bureaucracy argument; it's disingenuous when it comes from a man who headed that bureaucracy for over 10 years.
Blaming rote learning won't get us far as an explanation for lack of creativity. Exceptions abound -- especially in music, a field famous not just for mind-numbing repetition during the early years, but also for institutionalized reverence.
Finally, as stereotypes go, reverence to authority is seen as a defining feature of not just the Indian culture, but of Asian cultures in general. And as arguments go, it's too convenient: When you are down, it explains why you are are not competitive; when you are competitive, it explains why you are not creative; when you are creative, it explains why you don't get Nobels.
It's one thing for the Westerners to beat the Asians with that stick. It takes a certain "reverent Asian mind" to peddle that argument to his own people, and bask in the audacity of it all!
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I don't wish to go on. I'll just say that Indian scientists work under conditions that take a lot of basic, essential things out of their control -- from funding to electric power to water. What they need from their leaders are the resolve, the skill and the mental wherewithal to solve these little problems, so that they -- I mean the scientists -- can go about solving Big Problems.
Leaders who are impotent -- or, were impotent -- to get the little things right for their scientists should, at the least, shut the fuck up.
* * *
Mashelkar's little lecture about irreverence does many wonderful things -- for the leaders. It underplays -- conveniently! -- their role in ensuring the success of the scientists working in their organizations. It puts the blame for lack of success -- conveniently! -- on the working scientists themselves.
It allows leaders like Mashelkar give a grand and statesmanlike sheen to their high-profile outpourings -- it doesn't get any more high-profile than an editorial in Science! -- even though what they're doing are trashing their own people and peddling mindless boilerplate. Just think about it: wouldn't Mashelkar's editorial work even when we replace irreverence with initiative, proactive nature, big-think, audacity, or creativity? In fact, Mashelkar himself uses creativity synonymously with irreverence.
As a synonym for irreverence, Mashelkar also uses something else: 'spirit of adventurism.'
Yes, you read that right: it's adventurism, not adventure.
All I can say is: Sic!
Anubhuti Vishnoi in the Indian Express: New Incentives for IIT faculty.
Saumitra Dasgupta in The Telegraph: What the franchises won’t chronicle: From Season I, a Profitable League. An analysis of the accounts of Deccan Chronicle -- owner of IPL's Hyderabad team, the Deccan Chargers -- reveals the team actually made a tidy profit in 2008 -- the year in which it was at the very bottom of the League.
Simon Winchester in The Guardian: Iceland volcano: why we were lucky we weren't wiped out
Gendy Alimurung in LA Weekly: Been There. Done What?! Jillian Lauren opens up about her life as a teenage harem girl in Brunei.
K.S. Jayaraman has a piece in Nature entitled Report Row Ousts Top Indian Scientist (probably behind a paywall). Leaving aside the bit about "top scientist," let me focus on the new information in Jayaraman's report. In the following, bold emphasis has been added by me:
"Ayyadurai says that the report — which was not commissioned by the CSIR — was intended to elicit feedback about the institutional barriers to technology commercialization."
"Our interaction with CSIR scientists revealed that they work in a medieval, feudal environment," says Ayyadurai. "Our report said the system required a major overhaul because innovation cannot take place in this environment."
[Deepak] Sardana [co-author of the report] [has written] to science minister Prithviraj Chavan on 19 October saying that "it is not possible for me to continue working without your immediate direct intervention" because of the problems triggered by the report.
"I am more worried that the incident will dampen the enthusiasm of Indian institutions to hire expatriates in the future," says Valangiman Ramamurthy, the former science secretary of the government's Department of Science and Technology, who recommended Ayyadurai's selection.
Just one quick comment. Ramamurthy may have "recommended Ayyadurai's selection," but he's being silly in suggesting that it'll affect the hiring of expats.
Sure, Ayyadurai is an NRI, but are all NRIs Ayyadurais?
For the record, Jayaraman's piece does salvage the situation by quoting several others -- Gangan Prathap, Rajan Sankaranarayanan, and Samir Brahmachari -- who don't see things the same way as Ramamurthy.
In the 42-page document Shiva and Sardana described Brahmachari as the “director general who believes he knows all even though he has minimal depth of information and domain knowledge.”
The duo accused Brahmachari of “maintaining a close coterie of sycophants, mostly incompetent” and not allowing the opposition views for any debate. [source]
That's from the now infamous Chapter 7 of a report entitled "CSIR-TECH -- Path Forward" by Shiva Ayyadurai and Deepak Sardana. This chapter is about "the multiple challenges to realizing a CSIR-TECH company."
The authors also suggest a possible solution to this "challenge" of having to deal with a DG who "believes he knows it all" and who "maintains a close coterie of [mostly incompetent] sycophants". Here is their suggested solution, in full:
SOLUTION: 21st Century Leadership Training both short and long-term to be repeated until basic elements of leadership are learned. Beyond book learning.
May I request you all to stop laughing, now?
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A couple of quick observations:
If Ayyadurai chooses to pull this kind of stunt against the man who hired him (and whose support he needs for setting up CSIR-TECH), I have to wonder why he's protesting his dismissal.
Having vitiated the working environment with his report, why would Ayyadurai -- a man with 4 degrees from MIT and with 'rich' experience in starting and running companies -- want his job back? Strange ...
Hidden in the Mint story about Shiva Ayyadurai's travails at CSIR, there is this revealing statistic:
Over the past 10 years, CSIR laboratories have been granted 5,014 patents in India and abroad. The money earned from these was Rs. 36.8 crore, but the cost of filing them was Rs. 228.64 crore, according to official figures obtained by Hindustan Times (HT) through the Right to Information Act.
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BTW, the previous post on Ayyadurai has comments expressing strong views -- both favourable and unfavourable -- about CSIR. Just in case you are interested...
There's nothing new to report on Ayyadurai, but commenters have also pointed to a couple of links that tell us a little bit more about him and his short career as a 'consultant' at CSIR:
MIT News (from September 2007): East Meets West: Armed with 4 MIT degrees, Shiva Ayyadurai embarks on new adventure:
In the 26 years since he first arrived at MIT as a freshman, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai has earned four MIT degrees and started two multimillion dollar companies.
This fall, he will use his most recent degree, a Ph.D. in computational systems biology, and a Fulbright Scholarship to explore one of his lifelong interests: the intersection of Eastern and Western medicine.
Ayyadurai's upcoming project is the latest in a series of personal ventures that have spanned fields as diverse as electronic communications, animation and molecular biology. His experience shows what is possible with an MIT education, he says.
Rediff.com: Scientist vs establishment battle simmers in CSIR:
According to Ayyadurai, it all started when CSIR Director General Samir Brahmachari gave him a handwritten offer and detailed job description of the STIO's post.
In June this year, Ayyadurai was in India on a Fulbright scholarship. "At that time, a scientist whom I know said the director general of CSIR would like to meet me. I met him the next day and he invited me to join the organisation and make it into a centre of excellence," Ayyadurai said.
In a handwritten note, Brahmachari promised Ayyadurai that he would be the CEO of various companies he spins off and that he would also be eligible to be stake in such companies.
"I accepted it because in the United States if two CEOs shake hands, the deal is done. In this case, I got a written offer few days later and it was fine," Ayyadurai said, adding, "It was much later on that I realised that according to Indian law, he can't even promise those things."
Meanwhile, immediately after taking over, Ayyadurai set his sights on creating a structure for CSIR-Tech -- a company that would work with CSIR scientists to spin off their inventions into moneymaking products.
Ankita Anika Gupta of Mint has the scoop.
Here's a basic outline of the plot: Ayyadurai, a 45 year-old NRI scientist / technocrat, was parachuted into the CSIR system at a plum salary (by Indian public sector standards -- Band Pay of Rs. 60,000 + Grade Pay of 12,000).
It's not clear to me what exactly his mandate or job description was, but he ended up producing a report that was critical of the leadership at CSIR.
Result: he has been fired!
Here is a summary of where the two parties -- Ayyadurai and CSIR leadership -- stand:
“(CSIR) is attempting to remove me (in) reaction to my addressing well-known, intrinsic leadership issues during the course of my professional duties to serve the cause of Indian science and innovation,” said Shiva Ayyadurai in a 30 October letter, a copy of which is with the Hindustan Times. [...]
Samir Brahmachari, director general of CSIR, said Ayyadurai’s services were terminated because he was a “financial mismatch”. “He was demanding too much salary,” said Brahmachari. “Everyone told me I was pampering him because he came from abroad.”
With so much of he-said-(s)he-said in Gupta's version of the story, I still don't have enough to be able to offer a comment.
Do read that story, though. It'll give you a sense of -- and an opportunity, perhaps, to bask in some schadenfreude on -- the kinds of troubles that our institutions (and their leadership) are capable of inviting.
R. Ramachandran has a great Frontline story on the politics behind the recent establishment of the Science and Engineering Research Board.
First, the good news:
For the SERB’s 2009-10 budget, Ramasami proposes to double the amount that was disbursed by the SERC for projects during 2008-09, which means the Board will have an initial budget of about Rs.600 crore for 2009-10.
Now, the politics. SERB will be managed by a committee whose composition speaks for itself:
The approved SERB structure will have up to a maximum of 16 members and will include the Secretaries of the DST (who will also be the Board chairperson), the DBT, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), the Department of Health Research (DHR) and the Department of Expenditure in the Ministry of Finance (or his/her nominee), the Member-Secretary of the Planning Commission, and up to three members each to be appointed by the government from academic institutions, government research laboratories and other socio-economic sectors including industry. The Board, in consultation with the government, will also appoint an eminent scientist as its Secretary.
The Board will have an Oversight Committee of Experts (OCE), with quite a few scientists in it. But Ramachandran points out that while the OCE has the scientists, "it is only the Board [SERB] that has the powers to take decisions."
Here's another piece of the politics:
“The scientific community is not homogeneous,” pointed out a DST official. “There are camps and lobby groups and even sycophancy. After all, the Secretaries of the scientific departments are also scientists of calibre in their own right,” he added. Apparently, some scientists have pointed out that at least in the SERC there was a level playing field but in the SERB, funding might become vulnerable to the pressures from the Oversight Committee. “It would have been even worse if it had been left entirely to the scientists,” the official, who did not wish to be named, remarked.
There's a lot more in there for students of politics and sociology of science. Go read all of it.
Another nice guest post at The Wild Side. He illustrates a key point using an example from his own career:
practical problems can be equally compelling as fundamental ones, and often lead in turn to the discovery of new fundamental science. In particular, there is an intimate connection between the invention of new technology and its application to scientific discovery. My own research has certainly benefited from this interplay. Although I was trained to do pure physics (my doctorate is in theoretical physics) at a certain point I became interested in developing new measurement technology.
I began developing microfluidic chips, which is the technical name for what I like to call small plumbing. Eventually my collaborators and I figured out how to make small chips that had thousands of miniature valves on them — and I realized that we had invented the biological equivalent of the integrated circuit. Instead of a silicon chip with wires and transistors, we built rubber chips with channels and valves. This seemed like a universal tool with which we could automate and expand biology, just as the integrated circuit automated and expanded computation and mathematics.
After a serendipitous meeting with the structural biologist James Berger, I decided to focus on protein crystallization as an application — it seemed like a logical choice and there would be substantial engineering economies of scale that one could achieve. What we eventually stumbled on was in fact a rich playground of very basic problems surrounding the physics of crystallization, some of which continues to occupy me to this day.
First, the science journal Nature.
Next, the science blog host and popular science magazine Seed.
Finally, a letter to the American people from 76 American Nobel winners in science (video), read by Murray Gell-Mann.
Thanks to Sean the endorsement-aggregator for all these links.
Over at Lab Rats, Mint science reporter Jacob Koshy asks: Is the Indian Science Congress "a waste of time"? He links to this Indian Express story which quotes Prof. C.N.R. Rao (Scientific Adviser to the Prime Minister) as saying, "“I am sorry to say so but the Science Congress has become more of a mela. ... I have become frustrated with it. I have my research to attend to and decided to stay away.”
I have never been to the ISC, but I know a few people who have. Here are some impressions (please add your perspectives in the comments):
ISC lacks focus. Take, for example, ISC-2008 [pdf] held in Visakhapatnam. Its scientific agenda runs from transport systems to traditional and complimentary [sic] medicine to nanotechnology to linkages with social sciences to training the trainers. With such a broad coverage, you are lucky to find a few scientists whose work is of some relevance to yours. When travel money is so scarce, you would rather go to more focused conferences in your own field.
It lacks focus in other ways, too. It tries to serve too many constituencies: politicians, researchers, college teachers, school teachers, and all kinds of students (graduate, undergraduate, high school, and in some cases, even primary school). I'm not even including journalists and the general public. There's no way it can please everyone; I get the impression that it manages piss everyone off!
Since the Prime Minister attends this event (and makes a keynote speech), it attracts a whole bunch of science administrators and politicians. Their presence, in turn, attracts a bigger bunch of toadies people whose primary interest is in being seen in the company of biggies at the ISC. Science gets sidelined.
ISC does have a few scientifically focused sessions, put together by leading scientists who lean on their friends to come and present their work. But these sessions are a sideshow.
All of which are different ways of saying ISC privileges politicians -- of the regular kind and of the science kind -- over scientists and science. The conference organizers' primary interest is in pleasing the former. In the process, scientists get slighted -- for example, their lectures take place not in the posh plenary auditorium, but in shabby halls with poor audiovisual facilities -- and come away with strong feelings of disgust.
ISC does serve a useful function: ceremony and celebration. It's a platform for recognizing scientists through awards and prizes. But even this crucial function is not being done well. Consider, for example, the India Science Prize, which is like a science Bharat Ratna with cash. Given the prestige associated with it, you might think that this Prize would be taken seriously. Well, you would be wrong: the first Prize went to Prof. C.N.R. Rao in 2004; and then, um, it went into a coma!
Bottomline: It's true that many serious scientists avoid going to the ISC. Even those who do go, do so because of pressure from administrators or because they are among the prize-winners. Over the years, I think even the politicians have caught on to the growing irrelevance of the ISC; the PM's participation appears half-hearted. I cannot recall any major science policy speech made at the ISC in the past decade.
Just to follow up on this post: the Nature story is available (pdf) at the author's website. Like I said, do read it.
Thanks to the author, Erika Check Hayden, for the alert, and for making it available for free.
