As Andreas Klauke rolled through a 15,000-kilometre, 57-city tour of India on a train laden with scientific experiments and displays, he was greeted by cows on the platform, elephants in the street and a total of 2.2 million visitors.
For Klauke, project manager of the Max Planck Society's Science Express, the seven-month trip served as both educational outreach and a massive recruitment effort. The German society launched the project to foster collaborations and recruit students and researchers from India's billion-plus population — especially those who might do their PhD research with the Max Planck Society.
When the Indian government and the Munich-based society first discussed joint scientific outreach, they were unsure how to get to people in far-flung places. India has few museums, and moving exhibits from city to city would have been time-consuming and cumbersome. Then one Indian official recalled a travelling train exhibition that celebrated the country's independence in 1947. Someone jokingly suggested the same for the society's exhibition.
It proved a wise move. Once set up, the 400-metre-long train's 12 themed exhibitions — ranging from the origins of the Universe to three-dimensional protein animations — could stay intact for the entire trip. It reached small villages as well as large cities. Besides the occasional large mammal blocking the rails, the Science Express was sometimes slowed by the unexpected turnouts. "When 10,000–20,000 people showed up at some stations, the platform wasn't always big enough to handle the crowds," Klauke says.
A science infrastructure gap presents the biggest obstacles to Indian and German scientists working more closely together, Klauke says. He visited some research institutions and universities that had state-of-the-art molecular-biology labs next to labs with outdated equipment. "On one side, they make experiments by hand," he says. "On the other side, they have instruments to go deep into molecular structure."
Hoping to expand the reach of the programme, the Indian government will support another leg of the Science Express's trip in about three months, after some exhibits have been changed or updated. This time, Indian scientists will run the experiments and conduct outreach. And the journey will reach about 50 cities, mostly in the interior, an area not widely covered during the first tour.
