Skip to main content

‘India should take leadership role in international collaborations’

As scientists explore the frontiers of our understanding of the universe, science problems will get bigger and need more and more international collaboration, according to Nobel laureates Randy Schekman and David Gross, who were in the city on Friday as part of the Nobel Prize Series India 2017, a series of lectures and talks with scientists and policy makers held across Gujarat, New Delhi and Bengaluru.

Prof. Schekman won the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 2013 for his work in molecular biology. Prof. Gross, who is a theoretical physicist, won the Nobel Prize in 2004 for his work in quantum physics.

Prof. Gross said that the physical sciences were seeing more and more scientific problems that needed enormous collaboration in research. “A major portion of science today is on big science and big data, such as from the Manhattan Project to CERN. There has to be room for international collaborations or we will never make progress, even if it doesn’t fit our individual style of working,” said Prof. Gross. “I hope that India, a major economy rapidly becoming a global leader, will take a leadership role in international collaboration located here and led by its scientists,” he added.

Prof. Schekman, who is editor of open-access journal eLife, is a strong advocate of open access to scientific knowledge. “Many so-called reputed journals limit the number of papers they publish to maintain their exclusivity. And they may not always be credible; an investigation showed that 75 per cent of papers published in certain journals could not be replicated,” he said. He called for scientists in India to publish their work in open access journals and in archives, so that low-quality pop-up journals which did not ensure the veracity of the work published, become redundant.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What's ailing Namami Gange programme?(DTE)

Winters are extremely hectic for Sushma Patel, a vegetable grower in Uttar Pradesh’s Chunar town. Her farm is in the fertile plains of Ganga where people grow three crops a year. But this is the only season when she can grow vegetables. And before that, she needs to manually dig out shreds of plastic and wrappers from her one-hectare (ha) farm. “This is all because of the nullah,” she says, pointing at an open drain that runs through her field, carrying sewage from the neighbourhood to the Ganga. “Every monsoon, the drain overflows and inundates the field with a thick, black sludge and plastic debris. We cannot even go near the field as the stench of sewage fills the air,” she says. But Patel has no one to complain to as this is the way of life for most people in this ancient town. About 70 per cent of the people in Chunar depend on toilets that have on-site sanitation, such as septic tanks and pits. In the absence of a proper disposal or management system, people simply dump the faec...

SC asks Centre to strike a balance on Rohingya issue (.hindu)

Supreme Court orally indicates that the government should not deport Rohingya “now” as the Centre prevails over it to not record any such views in its formal order, citing “international ramifications”. The Supreme Court on Friday came close to ordering the government not to deport the Rohingya. It finally settled on merely observing that a balance should be struck between humanitarian concern for the community and the country's national security and economic interests. The court was hearing a bunch of petitions, one filed by persons within the Rohingya community, against a proposed move to deport over 40,000 Rohingya refugees. A three-judge Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, began by orally indicating that the government should not deport Rohingya “now”, but the government prevailed on the court to not pass any formal order, citing “international ramifications”. With this, the status quo continues even though the court gave the community liberty to approach i...

High dose of Vitamin C and B3 can kill colon cancer cells: study (downtoearth)

In a first, a team of researchers has found that high doses of Vitamin C and niacin or Vitamin B3 can kill cancer stem cells. A study published in Cell Biology International showed the opposing effects of low and high dose of vitamin C and vitamin B3 on colon cancer stem cells. Led by Bipasha Bose and Sudheer Shenoy, the team found that while low doses (5-25 micromolar) of Vitamin C and B3 proliferate colon cancer stem cells, high doses (100 to 1,000 micromolar) killed cancer stem cells. Such high doses of vitamins can only be achieved through intravenous injections in colon cancer patients. The third leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide, colon cancer can be prevented by an intake of dietary fibre and lifestyle changes. While the next step of the researchers is to delineate the mechanisms involved in such opposing effects, they also hope to establish a therapeutic dose of Vitamin C and B3 for colon cancer stem cell therapy. “If the therapeutic dose gets validated under in vivo...