CHANDIGARH: In a damning indictment of the Indian Science Congress, Indian-born Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan has refused to attend the Congress ever again. When asked by TOI on Tuesday why he wasn't attending the ongoing annual Science Congress in Mysuru, Venkatraman said, “I attended one day (of an earlier Congress) and very little science was discussed. It was a circus . I find that it’s an organization where very little science is discussed. I will never attend a science congress again in my life.” Last year, he had objected to politics and religious ideology being mixed with science.Addressing a gathering at Panjab University earlier in the day, Venkatraman alluded to a claim made by a participant at the 2015 Congress in Mumbai about planes having been invented by a sage in the Vedic era. He said, “The idea that Indians had airplanes 2,000 years ago sounds almost essentially impossible to me. I don’t believe it. The point is that if that technology was produced in a method so described that anybody could replicate it, then it becomes science.”Venkatraman, who was born in Tamil Nadu, is a structural biologist at Cambridge University; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009.