Breaking the age barrier: Crazy in love with genetics
“I fell crazily in love with genetics once I was introduced to the subject in high school and was determined to do a PhD in it. But in those days, universities did not have Genetics as a major. So I had to opt for Zoology for my Bachelor’s which had genetics as an elective course. Although I topped in my elective, I did terribly in my main subject scoring only 54% in my graduation.
It was hard to get into Master’s with such low grades but I still applied to as many places as I could and finally got through Madras University to pursue a Master’s in Molecular Biology. The environment was toxic; the classes were one-sided where the students weren’t allowed to ask questions or provide suggestions, unlike what I had been taught in Delhi where I did my Bachelor’s. I got into trouble for being vocal, was often publicly humiliated and judged by the kind of dresses I wore and the number of boyfriends I had. There was also a preconceived notion that people coming from the North had less intellect as compared to those in the South, and though I was a Tamilian born and brought up in Delhi, I still faced that discrimination. The laboratory at CMC Vellore I went to for my dissertation turned out to be more toxic than my institute, with little to no learning opportunities.
By the time I finished my Master’s, I got engaged. With 1.5 years left for the wedding, I sought a job going to institutes with my resume. I faced multiple rejections before finally landing a JRF position at IGIB in collaboration with AIIMS. During my interview process, my prospective supervisor remarked that he was skeptical of hiring women because they would get married. So I hid the fact that I was already engaged. When he found out about it from a colleague, he forced me to resign and even threw the first draft of my paper in the dustbin!
Few months later, I got married and moved to the US. I started applying for a PhD there and was rejected from every institute because I didn’t have a paper. I thought my career was over when my husband suggested I do another Master’s. I was lucky to get through the Cytogenetics Department at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there.
I worked as an intern in Baylor College of Medicine for 6 months after my Master’s which equipped me further as a researcher. I realized that Science in India harbors a personalized ego while in the US, it was more of a team ego rather than individualistic mindset. And the US academic system provided multiple scopes of learning new things. I applied for jobs at multiple places around this period since my student visa was about to expire, but kept getting rejected either because I was overqualified for the job or because I didn’t have the relevant experience. 1 month before my visa expiration, I was offered the position of a supervisor for a microarray team in a company based in Colorado. The amount of respect and love I got there as a team member somewhat compensated for all the hostility that I had faced before. But it was short-lived with Trump winning the election. We decided to move back to India because my husband’s job was at a risk. My colleagues arranged for a baby shower instead of a farewell; the Director remarked that I had the scientific acumen of a PhD student and insisted I pursue a PhD and rise up to his position.
However, life had other plans. All hell broke loose after I delivered. We didn’t know it back then but our baby was born neurodivergent. She wouldn’t sleep at all which kept me awake all night. I couldn’t keep her out of sight at all. But as time passed by, I thought I had to go back to work. My husband’s business wasn’t picking up at a pace we had hoped for and we were surviving on our savings from the US. I remember going to an AIIMS interview, getting humiliated, and coming back home to feed my daughter. I applied for the Women In Science DST fellowship for an industrial PhD but my interview got postponed to 2 years because of the pandemic. When I did get a chance to attend the interview, they gave me only 5 minutes to defend my proposal and rejected it thereafter.
I went on to work in a clinical laboratory in Gujarat which worked on genetics of male infertility. I made it clear to them that I would need some time to help my husband shift his business from Chennai to Gujarat and that my daughter was dependent on me. Nobody raised an objection back then, but after I joined, every time I was a few minutes late, I had to give a justification. It became a norm until a day when I was told that my salary would be reduced because I wasn’t good enough. I was ready to work with a lower salary but I asked them to give me in writing the mistakes I had made which brought them to this conclusion. They never provided me with one. So I quit.
Coincidentally, I had already made it to the PhD programme at Charotar University in Gujarat. My PhD work centered around identifying genetic markers for Indian male infertility with regards to tobacco usage, a practice that was quite prevalent in the area. The supervisor I had joined did not have a laboratory, the institute didn’t have any facility for studying human genetics and it had to be created from scratch which took up a year.
Within that period, I decided to do some statistical analysis with the data that was already available. The hospital data wasn’t digitized, but rather written on cards in Gujarati. I had to interpret the language and then get the data out of them. By the time the instruments arrived which we needed to set up the laboratory, my supervisor got an offer from the US and decided to leave. I was assigned another supervisor, who had no knowledge about my subject but was kind enough to let me carry forward my work in the way I wanted. Within a year, she also decided to leave because of family issues. I didn’t have a supervisor for a few months before being assigned one for a third time.
I also found out about my daughter’s condition around the time and it shut me off completely. I couldn’t get out of bed for days. My husband thought a trip to Goa with our friends would cheer me up. When my friends saw me, they recommended I go see a therapist. I didn’t think it would do me much good and I started the conversation saying I didn’t have anything to share but then cried endlessly in 2 continuous sessions. I was diagnosed with high functioning depression and was put on antidepressants. I don’t think I would have managed to survive this journey without those pills. Also, I would like to believe it is my never-ending love for genetics that has kept me afloat.”
-Divya Narayanan, PhD in Human Genetics, Charotar University of Science and Technology, Gujarat
Interviewed by Aniruddha Mukherjee and written by Payel Das
