The funny scientist

“I studied Biotechnology for the first time in high school and found the subject, especially recombinant DNA technology, way too enticing to ignore. I was fortunate to have received guidance from renowned people like Prof. K. Kannan, Prof. K. K. Aggarwal, Dr. Sayan Chatterjee and others at USBT, GGSIPU. I enjoyed studying Biotechnology and aspired to go for a PhD right after my B.Tech, which was not offered by many institutes at that time.

As I wanted to stay close to my family, I had to narrow down my applications to institutes, in and around Delhi. I secured PhD positions in both IIT-Delhi and CSIR-IGIB and chose to opt for the latter, as my interaction with Dr. Sridhar Sivasubbu, the man behind sequencing the first Indian genome, was very enlightening and affirmative. He was also very concerned about the well-being of his students, which further supported my decision of doing a PhD under him.

As I started working on a difficult problem, my first few years of PhD seemed extremely non-productive to me. The amount of data I generated in the first two years was so minimal that I could back them up in a single floppy drive. But my supervisor had faith in me. It didn’t matter to him if I wasted reagents or an expensive experiment failed, as long as I had tried my best and learned from the failed experiments. This gave me confidence and helped me stay motivated throughout my PhD. My…