Rajesh Kasturirangan 
First, I was pleasantly surprised that biology actually makes sense. Ever since I was forced to memorise sundry facts in eighth grade, I always considered biology as a collection of facts rather than a coherent subject. Of course, as I grew older, I started appreciating the power of evolution as an explanatory principle, but it is only in this workshop that I understood that modern cell biology also has logic to it. It might not be the logic of physics or mathematics, but it follows logic; there is a way to structure experiments around certain patterns — signaling pathways, protein structure, genes — patterns that allow the researcher to structure their own research in the form of a detective story.
I can see that resolving the mystery at the heart of the detective story can be as satisfying as the satisfaction that a physicist gets when he explains why the earth goes around the sun. I do not think I would have learnt this basic fact from textbooks in biology; one needs to hear experienced biologists talking about their own research life in order to understand the joy of doing biology.
Even more poignantly, I realised that there were quite a few people at the conference who were looking at problems that were analogous if not homologous to the problems in cognition I work on. I wouldn't be surprised if the same mathematical methods or basic principles lie at the heart of these questions, whether they are being asked of a fly or a human being. This realisation gives me hope that there is indeed some hope for a truly cross-special approach to the mind (not the brain!). So the most important if unexpected outcome of this conference was that I now know and can even feel the logic of the life sciences.
I found most of the participants engaging — surprisingly, there was always something to learn from everyone. For example, I learnt more about TB and why some strains of the bacillus are resistant to drugs than I ever knew before. At the human level, many of the concerns are universal — behind the doubts about funding and resources, there was the larger existential question about what life holds in store, the largest being – will a career in biology actually give me a reason to live? As an interested third party, I am cautiously optimistic about the prospects of this field in India. I think the resources are there — funding and support from the government and other agencies will only get better. The quality of young investigators is also very high as this workshop showed.
The only doubt I have is that perhaps many, if not most, low hanging fruit may have been picked. I don't have any evidence for this assertion except my subjective impression of the senior speakers. The senior most speakers spoke about problems I could understand and whose importance was clear even to me. Most postdocs who spoke started with a technical problem whose solution was incomprehensible. You could argue that this could just be a matter of time constraints and the talent of the senior speakers in weaving a compelling narrative.
On the other hand, it is also possible that the field as a whole has become hyper technical because there are too few conceptually rich domains left to explore. I am not enough of an expert to say which one is the case. In any case, I think the future of biology in India is bright if we keep getting a constant stream of faculty applicants from a pool similar to the one represented at this conference.
However, this brings me to my only major worry about this workshop. I got the subtle impression — from DBT, senior faculty members as well as many participants — that US's National Institute of Health (NIH) was the model to follow for Indian biology. I am not sure if this is the right decision. I agree that we need to vastly improve our efficiency and accountability as scientific researchers. However, there are two reasons to keep the NIH model at a distance.
The pragmatic reason is that we will never be able to compete with U.S researchers at their own game — they have many more people, more resources and a continuous infusion of hungry immigrants who will keep the system ultra-competitive. The more principled reason is that the kind of flexibility and freedom that Indian science at its best offers is precisely what is being lost in the U.S. Here, I think we have the opportunity to become a model for the rest of the world if we create an alternative culture of doing science, one which embraces risk while retaining a commitment to excellence.
The author is a faculty fellow at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bangalore, India.
