India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 02 :: Jan. 16 - 29, 1999

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EVENTS

A Congress low on science

The 86th Science Congress in Chennai does not appear to have succeeded in arriving at a set of priorities and directions to prepare the country to make the most judicious use of the tremendous advances in biosciences.

R. RAMACHANDRAN
in Chennai

THE statement that "biology is the science of the next century" has become a cliche. Evidence of the impact of biology and its applications on the whole gamut of scientific disciplines (collectively referred to as bio-sciences) is already with us. While on the one hand we have the obviously beneficial genetically engineered vaccines (for hepatitis-B, for example), on the other there are the controversies surrounding the introduction of transgenic plants (genetically modified plants) such as "Bt-cotton" and the looming fear of the adverse consequences of new bio-technologies that seek to control plant functions through genetic manipulations at the fundamental level. Is India, as a developing country, prepared to face the imminent revolution whose harbingers are Dolly the sheep and the "Terminator" gene?

Thus, the agenda of the 86th Indian Science Congress, whose focal theme was "New Biosciences: Opportunities and challenges as we move into the next millennium" would seem to have been inappropriate. However, it is a moot point whether the Congress, which concluded in Chennai last fortnight and which was the last of the century, achieved anything substantive by way of arriving at a set of priorities and directions to prepare the country for making the most judicious use of the tremendous advances in biosciences which, as India "globalises", would confront it with promises and also unknown risks. Indeed, any focussed discussion on relevant issues that took place was outside the ambit of the Congress; for example, the one on "Genetically Modified Plants: Implications for Environment, Food Security and Human Nutrition," at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF).

This is indeed characteristic of Science Congresses because the Congress itself - both in terms of organisation and content - has always been unwieldy and sometimes even chaotic. The very conceptual basis and the consequent structure of the Congress are so archaic that it does not lend itself to serious deliberation. The Congress inherently does not attract serious-minded scientists, and the plenary sessions, which are meant for top scientists from India and abroad to provide perspectives, largely get reduced to forums where the managers of Indian science, the 'scientocracy', who have never had, or have long ceased to have, a working knowledge of the issues involved, hold forth.

K. GAJENDRAN
Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee presenting the Shatabdi Puraskar to former Union Minister for Science and Technology Prof. M.G.K. Menon at the Indian Science Congress. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi, Governor M. Fathima Beevi and Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi are on the dais.

The final recommendations that are issued at the conclusion of the Congress are, therefore, no different from what the General President, who is usually one among this vast 'scientocracy', spells out in his or her address on the inaugural day. However, in an effort to lend some credibility to the event, a few notable scientists from abroad, including a Nobel laureate, are thrown in. This year Prof. James D. Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the double helical structure of the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in 1953 along with Sir Francis Crick, attended the Congress.

The trend is to seek to justify programmes that have already been undertaken or are very much on the agenda without adequate debate within the country. This is not to say that foreign perspectives and experiences are not relevant. But these have to be considered in conjunction with an Indian perspective. Unfortunately, given the growing public concerns, there has been no evidence so far of an Indian perspective on the various aspects of biosciences evolving outside of the Science Congress. The Congress too, not unexpectedly, failed to generate the basis on which such a perspective, which would go to meet the expectations of the scientific community as well as the public, could be formulated. For example, one of the recommendations of the General President this year, Dr. Manju Sharma, who is the Secretary of the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), is to set up a fund base of Rs.15,000 crores for biosciences over the next 10 years. The scientific community as well as the public ought to know the basis on which this estimate was arrived at.

Besides, the element of politicisation of the Congress (which has always been there as a consequence of the traditional involvement of the Prime Minister at the inaugural ceremony) appears to have increased over the years, aided apparently by a bid to ensure funding support for non-consensual perspectives in science and technology matters. Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee's remark complimenting the country's nuclear scientists in his inaugural address may be cited in this connection. He said: "Their (the scientists') achievements at Pokhran have filled the entire Indian scientific community with self-confidence." This would only seem to strengthen the skewed perspective that has emerged in the wake of the nuclear tests of what constitutes quality science.

Evidence of such misplaced priorities also came to the fore when, during a session on "Public Understanding of Science", Dr. R. Chidambaram, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), chose the forum of the Science Congress to dwell at length on the nuclear tests and their yields. Both Dr. Philip Campbell, editor of Nature, and Dr. Bruce Alberts, president of the United States National Academy of Sciences, who stressed the importance of creating a mass-based science awareness campaign, must have wondered whether what they tried to convey in their addresses had any impact at all.

Besides giving various awards to, as one scientist put it, "the same old tired faces" of 'scientocracy' since the last three years, there is also now the practice of giving an award - the Jawaharlal Nehru Birth Centenary Prize - to a politician or a "policymaker of importance", as Dr. Manju Sharma put it. Justifying this year's award to Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, Union Minister for Science and Technology and Human Resource Development, she said: "Besides, he himself is a scientist, a physicist." Dr. Joshi's credentials of being a physicist are well known.

Even from the perspective of the scientific agenda that the General President had set for the Science Congress, it could have achieved more if the agenda had been backed by sincerity and seriousness. At the plenary sessions, foreign speakers stuck to their task and made points relevant to the topics under discussion, important among them being Indian initiatives on the mapping of the genome (the totality of genetic coding contained in an organism), both human and plant, many Indian speakers chose the forum to talk about their individual research efforts, which should have actually formed part of scientific sessions in the respective disciplines. Even though the lengthy address by the General President outlined the important areas related to biosciences, the lack of focus, particularly with regard to the human genome component, was one important reason why there was no clarity about the route immediate research in biosciences in India should take. The way in which such research is headed in the developed nations was brought home succinctly by Sir Richard Sykes, chairman of the Glaxo Wellcome Group and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in his address during the plenary session called "Genomic Summit". Developments in biology, such as cloning (with human cloning experiments just round the corner) and transgenics, have raised concerns even in the developed world. This, he said, called for an informed debate involving the scientific community and the public.

The global human genome project, which is aimed at sequencing all the 100,000 genes of the human genome by the year 2003, would make it possible to identify genes that predispose persons to particular genetic disorders such as Alzheimer's disease well in advance and treat them through techniques such as gene therapy. Alongside this, advances in molecular electronics will soon enable putting the entire genome on two 5-sq-cm silicon chips, which would quickly diagnose such genetic disorders. This would underscore the social implications of a person having advance knowledge of an impending affliction. (This point was also emphasised by Prof. Watson in his address.)

Sykes said that with the sequencing of genes taking place at a frenetic pace and this resulting in better understanding of the molecular basis of diseases, the number of targets for treatment were likely to increase between five-fold and ten-fold in the next few years. Talking about "third generation pharmaceuticals", he said that the trend today was to make use of automation and combinatorial chemistry, which would synthesise a million synthetic molecules a year. Aided by robotics, one would soon be in a position to screen for biological activity at the rate of half a million such chemical structures a week.

K. GAJENDRAN
Dr. Manju Sharma, General President of the Indian Science Congress Association, with Nobel laureate Prof. James D. Watson.

IN his address, Prof. Watson, who was at one time critical of the world human genome initiative, said that India's interests would be best served by developing its own genomic industry. Stating that the human genome project was aimed at a better understanding of diseases and development of gene-based therapeutic methods, he said that earlier apprehensions concerning the project were largely driven by the fear of eugenics research in the early part of the century, which endorsed racism and gave rise to the idea that better people could be "bred" by employing "selective breeding". He, however, cautioned that given the ethical, social and legal implications of the complete genetic information of an individual being available after the human genome gets mapped, there should be regulations to ensure that total privacy regarding an individual's genetic information was maintained and the information was used only for beneficial purposes, such as treating diseases. "Countries that were afraid of DNA technology will stay in the past," he said, while speaking to the media. "The Greens were a group of misguided people who were opposed to the future."

Watson endorsed genetic diversity studies such as the one that has been launched by the DBT as part of its genome initiative, which basically involves mapping the genetic traits of the peoples of the land. The Indian programme, as drawn up by the DBT, comprises the human genome project, genome diversity and gene therapy and bio-ethics. The first component will utilise the information on the human genome for the diagnosis, prevention and therapy of genetic disorders prevalent in India, besides carrying out studies on the regulation of gene functions. In this context, the programme initiated under the Centre for Biochemical Technology (CBT) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in New Delhi, called Functional Genomics, an interactive research network involving molecular biologists, immunologists and biorganic chemists, is commendable because India is a large reservoir of random mutations and its rich genetic pool can be useful for human welfare if judiciously used in public health programmes. But how the various protocols have been evolved was not made very clear.

The second component, that of genome diversity, can become potentially controversial. Even the Peoples of India project launched by the Indian Government some years ago to study the various peoples purely in anthropological terms had led to a lot of controversy. There was in the study the possibility of the genetic information being misinterpreted. Unfortunately, it is this component which has been taken up by the DBT without sufficient debate within the country and without protocols having been evolved after consultations on a wider basis. It would seem that the forum of the Science Congress, aided by remarks from people like Prof. Watson, is being used to justify the programme retrospectively.

While it is apparent that agricultural biotechnology offers immediate and more significant benefits in the Indian context, it appeared from the presentation of Dr. E.A. Siddiq of the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) Centre in Hyderabad that adequate attention has not been given to this vital area. According to him, there has been no effort to map even crops that are of economic significance to the country, such as rice, sugarcane and cotton. He pointed out that the country was still importing all the molecular markers used in research while it should have identified markers for the various indigenous strains.

From the public point of view, issues of biosafety and regulation are of great importance, but unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of transparency in this regard. Only at the Science Congress did one get to learn of the existence of a three-tier system of regulation and monitoring that was put in place in June 1998. Interestingly, even the scientific community did not seem to be largely aware of the system in detail. Even the 1998 Guidelines are still incomplete in the sense that the parameters of monitoring and evaluating the economic impact of a given genetically modified organism (GMO) like the Bt-cotton of Monsanto-Mahyco, which is now undergoing trials, are yet to be evolved.

The perspectives of scientists such as Dr. Peter Raven, Director of the Missouri Botanical Gardens, Dr. Arie Altman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Dr. V.L. Chopra, former Director-General of ICAR, would seem to suggest that agricultural biotechnology is here to stay and has long-term benefits to society. According to them, if this was not the case today, one would not have 40 million hectares around the world cultivated with transgenics.

In the Indian context (which is vastly different from that of the developed world in several respects), the use of transgenics and GMOs would call for introduction only where benefits overweigh risks. Given the present public apprehensions, this would call for a focussed identification of research priorities, which are arrived at with a wider involvement of the public and transparency at every level. One had hoped that the Science Congress would help set the stage for that to happen, but it fell well short of that. The 86th Science Congress may have marginally triggered a public awareness, but much more needs to be done. The deliberations in Chennai will hopefully mark a beginning for a more sustained public involvement campaign as India enters a new millennium ushered in by biosciences and biotechnologies.