[Applause]
17:19 around the time there is this very
famous economist called Malthus who made
a very interesting observation that the
population of the world will stabilize
at around 1.2 billion dollar people and
the reason is there will be no more
ability to grow food for more people
than that today we are about six billion
people in this world the average age of
the lifespan of a person when Malthus
made this prediction was about 13
today it’s about 70 in every sense of
the word that you can think about
whether it’s infant mortality how we
live how long we’ll love in every way
you can think of we are better off than
what we had 50 years ago and 50 years
ago they were better off than it was 50
years ago and before that they were
better off than 50 years ago
what prude moth was wrong and what is it
that has made us little better happier
and nicer than continuously the answer
is only one it’s science it’s the human
curiosity and the ability to discover
and invent new things that’s made us
live longer better happier and is going
to continue but then who are these
people who are doing this and and and
these people are called scientists and
what did they do and how did they do
this
often I have people coming in especially
children I ask them who are scientists
what do you know about them and
depending on the age you get a number of
different answers if you ask a teenager
your information about a scientist comes
from Big Bang Theory or you know and if
you ask a little kid they often have
seen these pictures of these completely
crazy nerds who go into their little
hole and come up with these crazy ideas
who are unfriendly I mean these are all
interesting myths and ideas what I hope
I can do today is to tell you a few
stories
about scientists and what they do I wish
I was as articulate as our zoo was and
use all the words about creativity
imagination connectivity everything that
she said about an artist the truth is
all of them are to about scientists as
well so let me tell you a few stories
and then I’ll tell you what it means but
everything is not fun – okay so my first
story is about looking at our tradition
so started because of a couple of very
smart people whom I work with one
dispersant call professor domine another
is got person called Malala gala so the
story is that of Tennessee I’m sure many
of you have seen this idea of having a
policy plant and in olden days people
always offering it to God before it was
served to you so they will take a pot of
rice and hot when it’s just hard it’s
cooked they put a big dollop of ghee in
it and then they will put the green
color Tala see so it’s called the
rahmatullah see and then there is this
another tulasi called the Christian
mythology it is the purple color which
is often used to pray to God like a
flower and it’s never eat so what is
good what is this is there any reason to
do this what happens and why do you do
this and this is ancient wisdom people
did this is there a scientific basis for
doing this and one could ask this
question in multiple ways and these two
people along with a group of other young
students and postdocs decide to figure
out what this means
so what do they do technology has
developed tremendously that today you
always hear about sequencing the human
genome when you can sequence any genome
and they went about sequencing the
genome of the humble Tulsi plant then
they said okay now I know the genome of
the Tulsi plant what can I learn from it
they did something very interesting they
said what are the things that are
present in a tulasi they found that
there are interesting types of molecules
a depressant we will ignore the names
for solid acid you know it doesn’t
matter what their call and there are
hundreds and thousands of paper
which go around saying why these are
anti-cancer why these are antioxidant
they’re antifungal all of these then
they asked the question how come only
the green thoraseal’s use is not the
purple policy so they did an interesting
technique called transcriptome
sequencing to find out which one of
these policies has all of these
molecules and it turns out the green
policy has much larger of all of these
molecules than the purple policy and
it’s more interesting why is it that it
deserved the PERT wave eight was served
the reason it was served the way it was
served is all is important because many
of these are fat soluble compounds so if
you put it in when you put in hot rice
your pores open up they dissolve in the
ghee that is present and then you get
enough quantities of them when you eat
them with the rice it gets absorbed
better here’s an interesting idea of
something that happened that we could
it’s presented ancient wisdom that we
could use very high-tech modern science
to figure out why we did what we did
there are many other things like that
that one can do which you don’t know the
answers for let’s fast forward there’s a
problem if all of us decide this is
fantastic we will have large fields of
policy and no place for rice so what how
do we solve this problem so there is a
new area called synthetic biology what
we can do today is take the genes in the
tulasi plant right that makes all of
these compounds and put them in
something like yeast maybe that one that
makes bread for those kids around here
or for the others the one that makes
beer put it in this yeast and then make
some beer out of it which will make all
of this compounds and make some bread
which all of these compounds we can do
this without actually worrying about
replacing all our rice and paddy fields
and wheat fields with Tulsi so science
is taken us from ancient wisdom of
understanding how you can use this to
being able to find new ways for
benefiting from it I mean this is my
story number one
okay people expect that when I give a
talk I have to talk about the cockroach
what is the first thing that you do when
you see your cockroach you stamp it then
you killer but here is a small problem
with the cockroach it’s been around
through ice ages lived longer than all
of us have and it’s going to outlive all
of us okay
this humble cockroach is very
interesting and the cockroach that
you’re seeing on the top is called the
Pacific beetle cockroach and why is this
cockroach very interesting this
cockroach is very interesting because we
all think of cockroaches as species that
will lay an egg but this is an
interesting cockroach this has something
called the bird sac okay I’m just saying
this before dinner but there’s one more
speaker so you’d be fine and this
cockroach lays eggs a man in the bird
sac ask the embryo grows it makes milk
feeds the babies and the babies then
come out of this bird sacs fully mature
and ready to mate they’re going to be
there for a very very long time we heard
talks about history one of the best ways
for us to preserve history would be to
take all of these stories and history we
want to preserve make them in the
genetic code put them into the genome of
the cockroach and hopefully the future
generations will figure out to decode
our history right so there are wonderful
things that one can do but often the
enemy of science are also scientists
themselves so we did this work we found
out about this and you know it was there
in every newspaper every TV channel as
to how we have found the most nutritious
thing but what did the other scientists
think about it when we sent to publish
it and that was a very interesting oops
I okay here so first they read the paper
that we sent for publication and say on
the plus side and you know that as soon
as a paragraph or a comment comes back
to you saying on the plus side there has
to be another one which is on the minus
side so the plus side is in small
letters we can ignore them on the minus
side and this is the corruption that has
happened
among us I’ll tell you why the
corruptions change he says in the – site
these results have zero scientific
impact beyond reporting on a most
unusual biological phenomena right
not even for a specialising community as
there is none that exists for it none of
us are interested in the cockroach that
the first thing is and then they become
very patronizing they chase it’s hard to
understand how the quite impressive
effort extended to pursue these studies
was justified why did I put this up put
this up because this stood story of
looking at this cockroach and trying to
understand how these cockroaches make
this milk and all these beautiful
crystals appear came out of curiosity of
a bunch of young students who worked in
my lab now the person saying he’s a
scientist telling us no no no curiosity
you go and cure cancer so we have
fundamentally changed the paradigm which
need to reshift if you are actually
going to make further scientific
progress and then of course he’s
patronizing and says hopefully in the
near future these very capable
scientists will find more relevant
studies to pursue so we will leave it at
that
I’ll tell you a third story you know
scientists are very creative and we
really need to be creative in many ways
and here is a slide that I love it is as
I hurtle through space one thought kept
crossing my mind every part of this
rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder
so John clang so if you come to our
Institute and I want to order anything
if I want a water an equipment I need to
go with the lowest bidder and now I have
to be creative enough to do outstanding
science with this you know India has the
ambition of sending people to Mars so
there is an interesting little small
start-up called team Indus they’re
trying to send a lander to moon now this
is in Atlanta – moon whatever gonna do
on the moon and and we have a bunch of
people in my Institute we got very
excited about this idea and said we want
to do something all the more right so
what can we do on the moon
and we’re a stem cell Institute so you
remember the previous slide I will do
something about stem cells right if I go
now and do something else I may not get
money for it so it is it ok we will do
something with stem cells so there is a
colleague of mine called das who works
on a little one and the one is called
planaria ok and this planarians are very
nice little warms and the nice thing is
you can chop them into pieces and as you
chop them into pieces each piece will
become a full warm here are a bunch of
chopped set of worms that you’re seeing
they have been chopped in two places
some of them have eyes some of them are
only tails now if you go close by and
look at a tail and see this tail is
slowly growing a head and it becomes a
full warm and they’re back in action
again now what can we do with this one
can we send this moon two forms to the
moon on a moon lander but we have
constraints all we get this a coca-cola
sized box inside which you have to send
this moon and we have to cut them and
use them so here is the device that team
Indus has come up with along with us and
if you look at the bottom of the device
the thing that falls down the worms are
going to be down that’s going to come
down and cut these warms and then as
they will go up and there are little two
little tubes there and one of the tubes
of food you puncture the tube with a
laser the foot falls down and hopefully
once these ones become full worms we can
may see them go towards the food wise is
important one of the things that people
have when they come back from space for
a long time is muscle atrophy and if we
can understand how muscle if muscle can
regenerate well in space then maybe we
can figure out a mechanism to fix it and
if the one can move it means it does
develop this muscle very well so there
is a lot of imagination a lot of
creativity involved in actually first
thinking about an experiment making a
device that we can use it with and our
hope with this device if it works is to
give it a lot of schools and have the
kids connect these who go around picking
worms and cut them and send us pictures
through their cell phones of their
biology teacher to us and we can find if
we can find new types of planaria so we
can do all kinds of fun things like this
and won’t you leave with one message
that is better articulated by somebody
else
or any ballot in the Linda noble side we
said she says how likely is that someone
setting out to make it energy would
supplement we’ll go looking at a
cockroach gut
you can’t say science has to be directed
science has to be creative it has to
come from an individual’s curiosity and
this is a great fun time to be a
scientist and why do I say that
we have amazing technologies available
the coming of artificial intelligence
the robotics all these has made exciting
time where there is a convergence of all
of the different scientists the physics
the chemistry the engineering the math
are all coming together to create new
things but we have cultural challenges
as well the challenge that we’re going
to have is we are all used to being
specialists and super specialists how
are we going to now think from not being
a super specialist and say I’ve got to
work with the whole group of people in
order to accomplish anything that I had
to accomplish here after can we go
through this cultural change how are we
going to educate the next generations
and not teach them physics chemistry or
biology but all of them together if you
can get through all of these challenges
I think it’ll be fantastic and more
interestingly about half the people in
this audience are going to live for a
hundred years the other half is going to
live 125 okay now if you’re going to do
this there has to be a point in living
so this is where art and all of this
come about and also talked about
argumented reality it is science that
has brought what you’ll reality and occu
material to art and I’m hoping there
will be more artists than people who
give us a reason to live 150 years thank
you very much
[Applause]
17:19 around the time there is this very
famous economist called Malthus who made
a very interesting observation that the
population of the world will stabilize
at around 1.2 billion dollar people and
the reason is there will be no more
ability to grow food for more people
than that today we are about six billion
people in this world the average age of
the lifespan of a person when Malthus
made this prediction was about 13
today it’s about 70 in every sense of
the word that you can think about
whether it’s infant mortality how we
live how long we’ll love in every way
you can think of we are better off than
what we had 50 years ago and 50 years
ago they were better off than it was 50
years ago and before that they were
better off than 50 years ago
what prude moth was wrong and what is it
that has made us little better happier
and nicer than continuously the answer
is only one it’s science it’s the human
curiosity and the ability to discover
and invent new things that’s made us
live longer better happier and is going
to continue but then who are these
people who are doing this and and and
these people are called scientists and
what did they do and how did they do
this
often I have people coming in especially
children I ask them who are scientists
what do you know about them and
depending on the age you get a number of
different answers if you ask a teenager
your information about a scientist comes
from Big Bang Theory or you know and if
you ask a little kid they often have
seen these pictures of these completely
crazy nerds who go into their little
hole and come up with these crazy ideas
who are unfriendly I mean these are all
interesting myths and ideas what I hope
I can do today is to tell you a few
stories
about scientists and what they do I wish
I was as articulate as our zoo was and
use all the words about creativity
imagination connectivity everything that
she said about an artist the truth is
all of them are to about scientists as
well so let me tell you a few stories
and then I’ll tell you what it means but
everything is not fun – okay so my first
story is about looking at our tradition
so started because of a couple of very
smart people whom I work with one
dispersant call professor domine another
is got person called Malala gala so the
story is that of Tennessee I’m sure many
of you have seen this idea of having a
policy plant and in olden days people
always offering it to God before it was
served to you so they will take a pot of
rice and hot when it’s just hard it’s
cooked they put a big dollop of ghee in
it and then they will put the green
color Tala see so it’s called the
rahmatullah see and then there is this
another tulasi called the Christian
mythology it is the purple color which
is often used to pray to God like a
flower and it’s never eat so what is
good what is this is there any reason to
do this what happens and why do you do
this and this is ancient wisdom people
did this is there a scientific basis for
doing this and one could ask this
question in multiple ways and these two
people along with a group of other young
students and postdocs decide to figure
out what this means
so what do they do technology has
developed tremendously that today you
always hear about sequencing the human
genome when you can sequence any genome
and they went about sequencing the
genome of the humble Tulsi plant then
they said okay now I know the genome of
the Tulsi plant what can I learn from it
they did something very interesting they
said what are the things that are
present in a tulasi they found that
there are interesting types of molecules
a depressant we will ignore the names
for solid acid you know it doesn’t
matter what their call and there are
hundreds and thousands of paper
which go around saying why these are
anti-cancer why these are antioxidant
they’re antifungal all of these then
they asked the question how come only
the green thoraseal’s use is not the
purple policy so they did an interesting
technique called transcriptome
sequencing to find out which one of
these policies has all of these
molecules and it turns out the green
policy has much larger of all of these
molecules than the purple policy and
it’s more interesting why is it that it
deserved the PERT wave eight was served
the reason it was served the way it was
served is all is important because many
of these are fat soluble compounds so if
you put it in when you put in hot rice
your pores open up they dissolve in the
ghee that is present and then you get
enough quantities of them when you eat
them with the rice it gets absorbed
better here’s an interesting idea of
something that happened that we could
it’s presented ancient wisdom that we
could use very high-tech modern science
to figure out why we did what we did
there are many other things like that
that one can do which you don’t know the
answers for let’s fast forward there’s a
problem if all of us decide this is
fantastic we will have large fields of
policy and no place for rice so what how
do we solve this problem so there is a
new area called synthetic biology what
we can do today is take the genes in the
tulasi plant right that makes all of
these compounds and put them in
something like yeast maybe that one that
makes bread for those kids around here
or for the others the one that makes
beer put it in this yeast and then make
some beer out of it which will make all
of this compounds and make some bread
which all of these compounds we can do
this without actually worrying about
replacing all our rice and paddy fields
and wheat fields with Tulsi so science
is taken us from ancient wisdom of
understanding how you can use this to
being able to find new ways for
benefiting from it I mean this is my
story number one
okay people expect that when I give a
talk I have to talk about the cockroach
what is the first thing that you do when
you see your cockroach you stamp it then
you killer but here is a small problem
with the cockroach it’s been around
through ice ages lived longer than all
of us have and it’s going to outlive all
of us okay
this humble cockroach is very
interesting and the cockroach that
you’re seeing on the top is called the
Pacific beetle cockroach and why is this
cockroach very interesting this
cockroach is very interesting because we
all think of cockroaches as species that
will lay an egg but this is an
interesting cockroach this has something
called the bird sac okay I’m just saying
this before dinner but there’s one more
speaker so you’d be fine and this
cockroach lays eggs a man in the bird
sac ask the embryo grows it makes milk
feeds the babies and the babies then
come out of this bird sacs fully mature
and ready to mate they’re going to be
there for a very very long time we heard
talks about history one of the best ways
for us to preserve history would be to
take all of these stories and history we
want to preserve make them in the
genetic code put them into the genome of
the cockroach and hopefully the future
generations will figure out to decode
our history right so there are wonderful
things that one can do but often the
enemy of science are also scientists
themselves so we did this work we found
out about this and you know it was there
in every newspaper every TV channel as
to how we have found the most nutritious
thing but what did the other scientists
think about it when we sent to publish
it and that was a very interesting oops
I okay here so first they read the paper
that we sent for publication and say on
the plus side and you know that as soon
as a paragraph or a comment comes back
to you saying on the plus side there has
to be another one which is on the minus
side so the plus side is in small
letters we can ignore them on the minus
side and this is the corruption that has
happened
among us I’ll tell you why the
corruptions change he says in the – site
these results have zero scientific
impact beyond reporting on a most
unusual biological phenomena right
not even for a specialising community as
there is none that exists for it none of
us are interested in the cockroach that
the first thing is and then they become
very patronizing they chase it’s hard to
understand how the quite impressive
effort extended to pursue these studies
was justified why did I put this up put
this up because this stood story of
looking at this cockroach and trying to
understand how these cockroaches make
this milk and all these beautiful
crystals appear came out of curiosity of
a bunch of young students who worked in
my lab now the person saying he’s a
scientist telling us no no no curiosity
you go and cure cancer so we have
fundamentally changed the paradigm which
need to reshift if you are actually
going to make further scientific
progress and then of course he’s
patronizing and says hopefully in the
near future these very capable
scientists will find more relevant
studies to pursue so we will leave it at
that
I’ll tell you a third story you know
scientists are very creative and we
really need to be creative in many ways
and here is a slide that I love it is as
I hurtle through space one thought kept
crossing my mind every part of this
rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder
so John clang so if you come to our
Institute and I want to order anything
if I want a water an equipment I need to
go with the lowest bidder and now I have
to be creative enough to do outstanding
science with this you know India has the
ambition of sending people to Mars so
there is an interesting little small
start-up called team Indus they’re
trying to send a lander to moon now this
is in Atlanta – moon whatever gonna do
on the moon and and we have a bunch of
people in my Institute we got very
excited about this idea and said we want
to do something all the more right so
what can we do on the moon
and we’re a stem cell Institute so you
remember the previous slide I will do
something about stem cells right if I go
now and do something else I may not get
money for it so it is it ok we will do
something with stem cells so there is a
colleague of mine called das who works
on a little one and the one is called
planaria ok and this planarians are very
nice little warms and the nice thing is
you can chop them into pieces and as you
chop them into pieces each piece will
become a full warm here are a bunch of
chopped set of worms that you’re seeing
they have been chopped in two places
some of them have eyes some of them are
only tails now if you go close by and
look at a tail and see this tail is
slowly growing a head and it becomes a
full warm and they’re back in action
again now what can we do with this one
can we send this moon two forms to the
moon on a moon lander but we have
constraints all we get this a coca-cola
sized box inside which you have to send
this moon and we have to cut them and
use them so here is the device that team
Indus has come up with along with us and
if you look at the bottom of the device
the thing that falls down the worms are
going to be down that’s going to come
down and cut these warms and then as
they will go up and there are little two
little tubes there and one of the tubes
of food you puncture the tube with a
laser the foot falls down and hopefully
once these ones become full worms we can
may see them go towards the food wise is
important one of the things that people
have when they come back from space for
a long time is muscle atrophy and if we
can understand how muscle if muscle can
regenerate well in space then maybe we
can figure out a mechanism to fix it and
if the one can move it means it does
develop this muscle very well so there
is a lot of imagination a lot of
creativity involved in actually first
thinking about an experiment making a
device that we can use it with and our
hope with this device if it works is to
give it a lot of schools and have the
kids connect these who go around picking
worms and cut them and send us pictures
through their cell phones of their
biology teacher to us and we can find if
we can find new types of planaria so we
can do all kinds of fun things like this
and won’t you leave with one message
that is better articulated by somebody
else
or any ballot in the Linda noble side we
said she says how likely is that someone
setting out to make it energy would
supplement we’ll go looking at a
cockroach gut
you can’t say science has to be directed
science has to be creative it has to
come from an individual’s curiosity and
this is a great fun time to be a
scientist and why do I say that
we have amazing technologies available
the coming of artificial intelligence
the robotics all these has made exciting
time where there is a convergence of all
of the different scientists the physics
the chemistry the engineering the math
are all coming together to create new
things but we have cultural challenges
as well the challenge that we’re going
to have is we are all used to being
specialists and super specialists how
are we going to now think from not being
a super specialist and say I’ve got to
work with the whole group of people in
order to accomplish anything that I had
to accomplish here after can we go
through this cultural change how are we
going to educate the next generations
and not teach them physics chemistry or
biology but all of them together if you
can get through all of these challenges
I think it’ll be fantastic and more
interestingly about half the people in
this audience are going to live for a
hundred years the other half is going to
live 125 okay now if you’re going to do
this there has to be a point in living
so this is where art and all of this
come about and also talked about
argumented reality it is science that
has brought what you’ll reality and occu
material to art and I’m hoping there
will be more artists than people who
give us a reason to live 150 years thank
you very much
[Applause]
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