Episode 7: How the pandemic touched the lives of scientists: Part 2

(Lightly edited for readability)

Speakers

Bhramar Mukherjee, Shekhar C. Mande, Somak Raychaudhury, Manupati Hemalatha, Karishma Kaushik, Subhra Priyadarshini

00:00 Partner announcement: This episode is produced with support from DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance.

00:23 Subhra Priyadarshini: Welcome to the Nature India podcast. I'm your host Subhra Priyadarshini. It's July 2021 and 16 months into the COVID-19 pandemic. In India we're just about coming off the heels of a second wave that caused two crore infections around the country. The battle is far from over. But in this special two-part series of the Nature India podcast, we are taking a moment to pause, reflect, catch our breath, and bring you something a little different. We’ve perhaps never been so indebted to our frontline workers, and of course to our scientists, as we are today. In this tumultuous time, we wanted to get to know a few of the people behind the research within India and in the Indian diaspora. What has the pandemic been like for them professionally and personally?

In part one of this special two-part episode you got a glimpse into the lives of Bhramar Mukherjee, Somak Raychaudhury, Shekhar Mande, Karishma Kaushik and Manupati Hemalatha. They shared their fears, their challenges their difficulties from the past few months with us. Now, stay with me, as I ask, what gave them hope and optimism? What opportunities did they discover in lockdown?

01:52 Somak Raychaudhury: The interesting thing about pandemic shutdowns is that people often argue that it actually is pretty good for academics. As you know, Isaac Newton's year of miracles, the Annus Mirabilis, was during the time when his University, the University of Cambridge, shut down because of the plague. And he was sent home. That lasted about a year and a half, which is what is happening now as well. And such things have happened in history. This is not the first time things have locked down. And during that year and a half of the shutdown, Newton not only found the theory of gravitation, he devised the binomial theorem and an early version of differential calculus, almost everything that he's known for. And this happened because he was kind of isolated, living with his aunt, sitting under apple trees contemplating. The question is, is this contemplation helping us?

03:02 Subhra Priyadarshini: That was Somak Raychaudhury, Director of the Inter University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune. He poses an interesting question and my guess is yes. Even as the pandemic has transformed our lives, it has also in many ways catalysed progress. Bhramar Mukherjee tells us what that look like for her.

03:29 Bhramar Mukherjee: So the first modeling piece that we did was on March 20, 2020, and India's national lockdown came four days after. And our models were quoted everywhere, shared by politicians, on newspapers. So as statisticians and scientists in general, we are always working behind the scenes. So it is very hard for us to be in the limelight, and also be able to express ourselves in a way that, you know, common people can resonate, and that our modeling is taken seriously so that the policymakers intervene on time. So that rapid pace of science, that you do something and the next day you see it in the newspapers, and the third day that is being translated into policy, this is really at the same time very exciting, but also nerve wracking, because what you're seeing can affect millions of lives.

04:24 Subhra Priyadarshini: Bhramar Mukherjee is Professor and Chair of biostatistics at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. For her and many other scientists, it's been amazing to see terms like variants, mRNA, double blind, and randomised clinical trials become household jargon. And to see science impact policy, that is indeed heartening. COVID-19 has surely reshaped public thinking around science and data.

04:57 Somak Raychaudhury: All my life I've been very, very involved in scientific outreach and popularisation. And this is a thankless task to some extent because you normally interact with people in small groups, and it's very hard to multiply. The online interaction that has happened in the last few months has opened this up completely to a very, very large audience.

05:23 Subhra Priyadarshini: While we isolated in our homes and moved everything online, scientists suddenly found their work reaching people, far and wide. Somak gave us an example of a solar eclipse, an event that is often used to drum up enthusiasm for science and for astronomy and the skies.

05:42 Somak Raychaudhury: Last year, we went online, and we showed the eclipse as it was visible right across the country. And we had a three-hour programme in which we involved a lot of experts to talk about what the eclipse mean sociologically, in mythological terms, in our daily lives, and things like that. And they came together and we had this on YouTube. And 150,000 people attended this, right? So this reach could no way have happened. And this, I think, has become one of the very interesting things that we are looking forward to taking beyond the pandemic period. This just means that we can scale things up a huge way.

06:32 Subhra Priyadarshini: Before March 2020, numbers like what Somak describes would have been unthinkable. But science outreach has truly grown by leaps and bounds in recent months. We hear more on this from Karishma Kaushik, a scientist and science communicator from Pune who turned the pandemic into an opportune time to spur children's interest in science.

06:58 Karishma Kaushik: One day, I was just thinking that, you know, there's this surge of webinars, and what can we do to leverage this, keeping in mind our original plan of taking science to schools. And then it occurred to me, and I immediately texted, Snehal. I said, can we do science outreach through webinars for children? And we had so many questions at that time, to be honest – will children show up? Will this webinar platform work for children? Will parents be okay with it? Will we get a steady stream of participants? How engaging can it be? How interactive can it be, given that it's a virtual interface will they build a connection with us? And so we just rolled out on March 31^st 2020, it was just a few days after national lockdown had been announced in India. We said befittingly, let's keep our first webinar for young minds titled ‘COVID-19 for kids’, where kids can talk to us scientists about everything they want to know about COVID – why they're at home, why there's no school, why they need to wash their hands regularly, why they can't go down to play. And so we started with COVID. And then we ran weekly with new science topics every week from biofilms, antibiotic resistance, black holes, plant communication, malaria, tuberculosis. And through these weekly sessions, we christened our programme “Talk to a Scientist”, a one-of-a-kind science outreach webinar-based platform for young minds in India, where they actually get to hear about science being done by real scientists in real laboratories across India. The goal is mainly to build pride in Indian science, and to build role models in Indian science. And since then, we have run seven seasons, we are on session 77, or something like that.

08:39 Subhra Priyadarshini: Wow. Now that's remarkable. With every session, Karishma is holding up Indian role models in science for the next generation. She told us that this work has also helped her appreciate the impact and contributions scientists can make beyond primary research.

08:59 Karishma Kaushik: I've always wanted to contribute to science in India beyond research. And I think the defining moment for me during this pandemic was that in some strange way – one could call it a silver lining – but this pandemic, this time, gave me a chance to contribute to the ecosystem beyond research through outreach, communication, through interactions with the Science, Technology and Innovation Policy in 2020. Because everything was virtual, there was no question of traveling for all these commitments.

09:29 Somak Raychaudhury: What has happened is, on the day to day basis, the meetings that are required for us to go to Delhi all the time, for example, to meet our government bodies, the meetings that we need in small groups to decide on certain projects, a lot has gone online. And that's very good. Now it has also meant that we have now learnt what can be done online and what can’t. And that leaves a lot of time, just like Newton did under the apple tree, for us to do our science, I think. And I think that has really helped us.

10:08 Subhra Priyadarshini: So true, isn't it? Just like Somak shares, without the daily commute that structured our daily lives before the pandemic, we've all discovered more time to focus on doing the work that matters. As Manupati Hemalatha from Indian Institute of Chemical Technology Hyderabad shares, her team's work around sleuthing into wastewater for the presence of the virus could help India predict the imminent third wave of COVID-19 and of course, future outbreaks.

10:44 Manupati Hemalatha: So when it comes to SARS-CoV-2, what we found was if wastewater treatment monitoring systems can adapt any strategy, where we can test the samples twice a week or once a week, then early on we can say that there are some microorganisms which are coming into the environment and that might affect or might cause contagious disease. Even for the viruses also, we can state that based on these wastewater epidemiological studies, so that we can set up – that is one thing.

11:14 Subhra Priyadarshini: Hemalatha shared this small incident from her visit to a sewage treatment plant last year that struck a chord.

11:23 Manupati Hemalatha: Even sewage treatment plans also we visited initially, in July 2020. That time even the persons who were maintaining the STPs, they didn't have a complete educational background of the STP. Even they used to ask very surprisingly, what we will be doing with this. And is the COVID-19 contagious in this treatment plant, or is it affecting any persons -- they used to ask questions and they used to take the knowledge from us. So we were happy to share whatever we know, because till now, there are no reports stating that from wastewater the infection is happening, the transmission is happening. So with that knowledge, we used to tell them that you also maintain COVID norms like wearing masks continuously. And if you want to go to sampling or any cleaning of the tanks, you have to wear these glasses, we used to teach them. That was a good experience.

12:20 Shekhar Mande: There are a number of things that scientists, as human beings, stood up and delivered when it mattered the most in one of the worst crisis of humanity. And it's very heartening to see that scientists around the world together rose up and realised that they can work together. They can work with industry, they can work with the society, and come up with innovative solutions driven by science and technology.

12:45 Subhra Priyadarshini: That was Shekhar Mande, Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research headquartered in Delhi. On a more personal front, he felt that this pandemic time even as it has tested us, has also increased our empathy towards one another. If that is indeed the case, isn't that a positive outcome?

13:07 Shekhar Mande: That only makes us more resolute in addressing problems of future. With this empathy for other human beings, to other animals, to plants, to our planet in general if we can all now start addressing problems of the future.

13:21: Subhra Priyadarshini: and perhaps start addressing the problems of today too. For instance, the glass ceiling that is faced by so many women in science, and really in every other field. Maybe in this strange new normal, it's time for that to shatter. Here's Bhramar Mukherjee.

13:41 Bhramar Mukherjee: I'll go to many Indian panels and TV shows where I'd be the only woman modeler. And that has been, I have to say, that people pick on you on many different levels, because these barriers in terms of how science is taken seriously, still exist in our society. You know, I have had a career as a statistician in the United States for 20 years. Suddenly, like you know, because some of our predictions came true and we have been working on this sincerely, there's a lot of media attention as an immigrant scientist. All my professional circle of friends always resided in the United States. For the first time, I felt that since I left the country as a 23-year-old woman, and now after 25 years, I reconnected with the Indian scientific community, with the people of India. And that's, that's very inspiring too.

14:37 Subhra Priyadarshini: Another thing that inspires scientists is that, as we emerge scarred but wisened from the lessons we've learned during this time, we will be more prepared for the next pandemic, whenever that may be.

14:52 Somak Raychaudhury: We will get through this. There's no doubt about that. It's amazing how fast vaccines were produced. And even though we do not know the ramifications of many of them long term, but it is managed to be very, very effective. So yes, I'm absolutely sure that we will come out very soon out to the other end. But it does not mean that this will not happen again. Such things will happen again, and it just makes us stronger in terms of knowing what to do.

15:24 Shekhar Mande: The hope is essentially that more and more people start trusting science. Scientists are individuals who are working towards finding the answers to the problems of nature, addressing very fundamental issues to try to learn the nature around us. And scientists are also individuals who accept when they are not able to find answers, that his answer is beyond our perception or our comprehension. But that does not mean that is a shortcoming of the science. It only means that the level of knowledge that we have reached today can address only so much. But if people start trusting us, I believe we will have solutions addressed much more effectively.

16:04 Subhra Priyadarshini: Shekhar Mande makes an important point. In a year that brought so many challenges, science truly made some significant advances. We've realised from the last one and a half years, what science can do, and also how we need to improve for the future. That's good enough reason for all of us to trust the individuals behind the science, no? It's been heartwarming getting to know a little more about these scientists, each of whom so generously shared their learnings with us. Thank you for listening to their personal stories over this special two-part series. I hope the silver linings shared beneath the proverbial apple tree have inspired you just as they have done for me.

We'll be back with more soon. If you liked this podcast, please check our previous episodes in Hindi and English on the Nature India website. Please do share it with others in your network interested in the latest in India's science. I'm Subhra Priyadarshini and this is the Nature India podcast.

17:16 Partner announcement: Thanks to the DBT Wellcome Trust India Alliance for their support in producing this episode.

Never miss an episode: Subscribe to the Nature India Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Acast or your favourite podcast app. Head here for the Nature India Podcast RSS feed.