Science
G N Ramachandran - The Great Indian Scientist's Centenary Birthday Today
- Behind the triple helix model and the Ramachandran plot, G N Ramachandran put Madras on the map of science.
GNR explaining Triple Helix to his students.
If you happen to go to the Central Leather Institute in Madras then you will find an auditorium with a unique name 'Triple Helix'.
Triple Helix is the structure of a protein called collagen. It is the important protein essential for the connective tissues, tendons, ligaments, cartilage and bone.
Gopalasamudram Narayanan Ramachandran, or simply GNR, with his first post-doctorate student Gopinath Kartha in a paper published in the magazine Nature in 1954, 'Structure of Collagen', proposed the triple helical structure.
GNR had proposed in his model two hydrogen bonds between these interchains. This model became famous as 'Madras Triple Helix.'
Let us pause here and remember that India had just then won her freedom. The science-research infrastructure were not by any stretch of imagination globally competitive.
Due credit has not been given to GNR for this important discovery.
One should mention here particularly the complete freedom and patronage that was given to GNR by Padma Vibushan Arcot Lakshmanaswami Mudaliar (1887–1974).
After Mudaliyar, the university was headed by people who seldom understood the greatness of the work done by GNR.
His strong and rigourous commitment to the problems in biophysics were not reciprocated even by the then coming students and colleagues. The man who had become the head of the department when he was 30, now suffered an isolation. And yet he worked.
In a way GNR was an outsider to the field in which he made the impossible possible. He was working on optics and diffraction theory under CV Raman.
In the first year of his pre-doctoral studied he came across two books in his shelf. One was 'Nature of the Chemical Bond' by Linus Pauling and 'Natural and Synthetic High Polymers' by Kurt Meyer.
He was so enamoured by the subject. He wrote: 'I took crystal chemistry as anextracurricular subject of study and as part of this, crystal structures came in serious consideration.'
He also developed the famous Ramachandran Plot that has been a beautiful mathematical tool that help researchers unravel protein structures.
Most eminent scientists of the world used to attend the event and give lectures.
Today is the 100th birth anniversary of this great man. The new India that puts special emphasis on STEM education as well as self-assertion is celebrating its seventy-fifth year of Independence.
GNR personifies all these values: setting standards for doing science, institution building, remaining in India to further science and a rootedness in Indian heritage.
India should honour him at least now in the way he deserved to be honoured.
