They are studying everything from nanomotors to DNA damageThe Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology is arguably the most coveted prize for science in India. Named after the founder Director of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), the late Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, the annual prize was first awarded in 1958.The prize is open to any citizen of India under the age of 45 and who is conducting research in one of the following seven disciplines: Biological Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Earth, Atmosphere, Ocean and Planetary Sciences, Engineering Sciences, Mathematical Sciences, Medical Sciences and Physical Sciences. Each discipline can have up to two winners. prize is based primarily on research done in India over the preceding five years and comes with a cash prize of Rs 5 lakh.The work of this year’s winners ranges from research into DNA damage and repair to drug-delivering nanomotors to CO2 capture and storage. Mirror spoke to 11 out of the 13 recipients (two were out of the country) to learn more about what’s happening on the cutting edge of science in India.Mandal, 44Department of Chemical Sciences, IISER-KolkataField of research: Developing sustainable chemical processes“Any material, drug or synthetic fuel, involves chemistry, particularly chemical synthesis. To facilitate such a process, you need a catalyst and they are mainly based on heavy metals,” says Dr Swadhin Mandal. Dr Mandal’s work is geared towards developing non-toxic catalysts for various industrially important processes, and how these can be effectively used in both pharmaceutical and chemical industries. His work has shown how greenhouse gases like CO2, mainly responsible for global warming, can be converted into alternate fuel such as methanol under ambient conditions without using any metal-based catalysts. “Such a process can reduce the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and can convert it into a high value product,” says Dr Mandal.Dr. Parthasarathi Chakraborty’s work involves trying to understand how traces of metal in the marine ecosystem affects its carbon cycles. According to the NIO, which Dr Chakraborty joined in 2008, he has “initiated a metal speciation study (after establishing the first metal-speciation laboratory in India… to realise the important role of metal-natural ligands interactions in controlling distribution, fate, mobility, and bioavailability of trace/heavy metals in marine environments (estuarine, coastal and open ocean)”. The results of Chakraborty’s research have been published in some 58 national and international journals of repute, and earned him a place, as associate member, on the Scientific Committee on Ocean Research Working Groups – a global body that tries to address “interdisciplinary science questions about the ocean”.Dr Amit Agrawal has been working towards creating next-generation diagnostic micro-devices that will bring the hospital to the patient. “These should replicate exactly what can be done by the corresponding tools in labs,” he says. One of the devices he has created allows plasma to be extracted from blood so that it can be used for further processing. The device is the size of a coin. Agrawal was also lauded for looking beyond the Navier-Stokes equations, which have been used to describe fluid flow for close to two centuries, even though they don’t work very well in every situation — like in the case of aircraft flying at a very high altitude. “We set out to find solutions that are beyond Navier-Stokes and to propose our own equations — which we are testing. It could open the door to solving a host of fluid flow problems,” Agrawal says.From how idlis metabolise in our stomach to how diabetes debilitates our organs, biochemistry can answer anything about the human body. And Ganesh Nagaraju, an alumnus of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, is pushing the boundaries of biochemistry to save lives from cancer, fanconi anemia and several other genetic diseases. Nagaraju says that the body has its own mechanism to fix DNA damage to check genetic mutation. “We are interested in understanding the molecular mechanisms of DNA damage response, repair pathways and chromosome instability associated with genetic diseases and cancer.” Nagaraju’s lab is focused on the repair of DNA double-strand breaks, considered to be the most dangerous of all the DNA damages. In 2016, his team was able to take a giant leap. They developed an anti-cancer agent along with the Department of Chemistry. “Now, we are looking to study this molecule at the next level, using mouse model system,” he says.Cell biologist Thomas Pucadyil has been researching the recreation of cell membrane systems and how they split. “The process of slicing the membrane into two is known as membrane fission. It’s like an ice cream on a stick. You can’t hold the stick and pull the stick out of the ice cream – the entire ice cream comes along. That’s essentially the same problem with membrane proteins. If you tug at the protein, the entire membrane bends in. So the only way you can transport these proteins is if you allow the membrane to bend in and cut the neck of the membrane,” says Pucadyil, describing the mechanism by which proteins are transported in cells packaged into vesicles. Control over membrane fission may hold the answers to how infections can be prevented with the possibility of creating vaccines, but there are no tangible results of his research at this stage, points out Pucadyil. Peers recognise Pucadyil, who was the only Indian scientist amongst 41 researchers from 16 countries to receive a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation last year, as an international research scholar.Dr Rahul Banerjee says that when hydrogen reacts with oxygen, it produces water – as well as energy. “This energy can be utilized to solve global energy problems, and we are working towards making new materials or compounds for hydrogen storage.” Dr Banerjee’s other focus areas include discovering materials which will sequester/filter carbon dioxide from the exhausts of vehicles, and he is working on creating a filter made from porous materials. “The porous nozzle will filter carbon and thus help solve the problem of pollution,” says Banerjee.In 2010, Ashwin Gumaste built a bunch of products for the government, including carrier Ethernet switch routers – high-speed transport routers with a fully Indian design. “We had port-to-port latency of one microsecond across three layers of the telecom stack, whereas our competition – Chinese or Western – was at 100 microseconds. So, we were faster, which meant that energy consumption was lower, and cost points were competitive. We transferred the technology to Electronics Corporation of India in 2011 and we have since deployed it in multiple networks,” says Gumaste.In April this year, he launched a much larger router, which was developed under funding from DRDO. “Our [nation’s] electronics import bill (which includes telecom) is higher than the oil import bill, and that was a matter of grave concern. So, the goal was to make indigenous products.”Simply put, Professor Amit Kumar’s work will help make problem-solving quicker in the real world. “We study fast algorithms for problems which have huge number of possible solutions but we want to pick out the best or optimal one. One needs to build new models and algorithms to understand this class of problems.” His peers at IIT say that Kumar’s work on algorithms is already being applied in the operation of data centers. “For example, when we search for something on Google, the search request goes to a server in a data center — how do we decide which data center and which server in it gets used to answer this query? How do we decide how soon to process this query because there could be many other such queries in the queue? Each server consumes lot of energy - in fact 2 percent of global energy goes into data centers. How do we do conserve energy while processing all these queries? All of these are applications where scheduling algorithms play a key role,” says his peer Professor Naveen Garg.What are nanomotors? These are tiny machines that can convert chemical or externally applied energy into mechanical motion. And what does Ghosh, an alumnus of IIT-Kharagpur, Brown University and Harvard University, want to use them for? “To deliver drugs to specific cells in human bodies, especially in cancer patients. For instance, when you inject the drug during chemotherapy, it goes everywhere and not just to the cancerous cells. Healthy cells get killed too. Now imagine if we can deliver the drug directly to the cancer cells, in a controlled manner, we can avoid all this.” Thanks to his collaboration with chemists, biologists, and material scientists, his research is inching closer to reality. “We have developed a microscopic glass screw that can be used to target tissues using externally applied magnetic fields. It is non-invasive and doesn’t need a chemical fuel and that is why this technology is popular in the medical world.”Dr Nitin Saxena says he abstractly analyses computers using Algebra. “I use it to solve computer science problems. Along the way, this research creates a new kind of Mathematics that is beautiful and sometimes even practical. It is also called Arithmetic Circuit Complexity. In this area one solves certain problems faster, or proves that certain problems cannot be solved faster no matter how clever we are.”And how is his work applied in the real world? Algebraic Complexity, says Dr Saxena, is used in computers to store information and transmit it in a secure way. Many practical algorithms use some Algebra in their details.These include cryptography, error-correction, Machine Learning and graphic manipulation. According to his peers, Dr Saxena’s work is significant, especially at a time when cryptography and cyber security are becoming very important.Madineni Venkat Ratnam is invested in the study of middle-atmospheric structures and the sun-earth interactions. He is also part of an ISRO-NASA project studying the dense blanket of pollutants hanging 13 to 18 km above Asia. “Global warming and climate change is easier to measure in the middle atmosphere than on the Earth’s surface. For instance, the processes exchanged between the stratosphere and the troposphere have a direct link to climate change. When water vapour from the troposphere reacts with ozone in the stratosphere, it destroys the ozone, leading more UV rays to hit the Earth.” Scientists could perhaps use this lead to predict the future of the stratosphere, he says.Researchers are trying to identify biomarkers (or molecules) that signal the underlying condition of a psychiatric disease, the knowledge of which is much more accessible in the case of heart diseases, for instance. That’s where Ganesan Venkatasubramanian comes in. He has been trying to understand psychiatric disorders through the lens of evolutionary biology of the human brain. Over the past decade, his research on schizophrenia has suggested a link between systemic immune-metabolic aberrations and brain deficits, and it can be used to identify newer pathogenic and possibly novel therapeutic avenues for schizophrenia.Quantum information and computation, says Dr Sen De, is a science at the crossroads of physics, computer science, mathematics, and information theory. “It has been shown that the performance of communication can be enhanced by using channels that observe quantum mechanical laws. ” That means faster internet, of course, but quantum mechanics, says Dr Sen De, is also being put to use for national security. “We work closely with the Armed Forces. Say, there are two camps and messages have to be transmitted securely between them, for this quantum mechanical networks can be used.”