How did you become interested in evolutionary biology?

While I was doing my BSc Honours in Botany at Delhi University, I found genetics very interesting, because it brought back many of the things that I had liked about math and physics. There was a lot to understand, rather than just a lot to memorize. I remember being particularly impressed with how Jacob and Monod worked out the operon. I still think that's one of the most beautiful things in genetics.

So after my BSc I applied for admission to MSc genetics at Delhi University. We had a course in population genetics the first year, taught by Professor C R Babu. He was quite simply the most amazing teacher I've ever had in my life. Many of the things he said in class I can still remember after almost thirty years.

Population genetics was just beautiful—it was cute, it was lovely. I really liked it. And so I decided to go for a PhD in evolution, and ended up working with Larry Mueller at Washington State University.

There was a certain amount of contingency in the choice of subject. I could as well have ended up a professor of Urdu literature or philosophy. I was reasonably clear that I wanted to be in academics. I couldn't then and I can't now imagine being in any other profession.

Can you describe some highlights of your current research?

The approach that we take in our lab is called experimental evolution. Instead of using an existing species to infer what might have happened in the past, you work with an organism that allows you to observe several hundred generations within a few years.

What we do is set up evolutionary problems for populations of fruit flies to surmount. For example, we took one set of populations and said that only those individuals that become adults at the fastest speed are allowed to breed for the next generation. After seventeen years and 600 generations, these populations are the fastest developing line of Drosophila melanogaster that anybody has ever seen.

When we asked what traits were sacrificed for the sake of developing fast, we found that these flies areworse than their ancestors at surviving to adulthood. We also found that faster developing flies preferentially burn lipids over carbohydrates as pupae. This gives them more energy per microgram, but it depletes their lipid reserves, which reduces fertility. In these populations you have to first be among the fastest 20% to emerge, and if you burn up your fat reserves and lower your chance of survival to develop quickly, you will probably still have higher fitness.

Our recent work follows up on our observations that different competitive strategies can evolve under conditions of high larval density. Our evidence suggests that when a culture vial's food column is very short, the build up of waste means that even though food is scarce, feeding faster will not help larvae survive. We are developing our results into a broader view of competitive ability that emphasizes the interaction between environmental context and larval density in the determination of density-dependent fitness.

We have also shown that density-dependent selection can lead to the evolution of more stable population dynamics. In collaboration with Dr. Sutirth Dey (IISER Pune) we are trying to develop integrated models of the evolution of both density-dependent fitness and population dynamics. These results represent the first major conceptual advances in density-dependent evolution and population dynamics since Larry Mueller’s seminal work in this field in the 1980s and 1990s.

What is the most satisfying research problem you've worked on?

When I was a grad student, I became interested in the so-called cost of sex problem in evolution. I found that there was a huge debate that had been going on for twenty years in the literature about what the cost of sexual reproduction really was. John Maynard Smith argued that it was the cost of producing males, while G C Williams argued that it was the cost of genome dilution.

I remembered from my BSc that dandelions and other asexual plants produce partially sterile pollen. But in all the models of the cost of sex, people assumed that plants that produce asexual eggs either do not produce pollen, or they produce pollen in equal amounts and with equal fertility as sexual individuals. So I built a model, which would look between these two extremes, treating the output and fertility of male gametes as separate variables. It very quickly turned out that the cost of sex has both components—cost of male function and the cost of genome dilution. If you model only these two extreme cases, you will either find that the cost of sex is due to the cost of male function or that it is due to the cost of genome dilution. Between extremes, there are both components to the cost of sex.

This work eventually grew into several papers with Professor Mike Moody in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. In terms of satisfaction, this is one of the most satisfying pieces of work that I have done. It solved an old problem in a very clean way, by showing that what you are seeing as a problem is the fact that you're not looking at the whole picture—you are just looking at two extremes of the spectrum.

In some sense the work was all the more rewarding because there was no need for me to do it. It wasn't part of my thesis work, or work that somebody had told me to do. It just grew organically out of something interesting that I studied in a course, and then led to eventually something very nice.

What advice would you give to people starting out in science?

If you do your work with a certain passion, your career will take care of itself, and you will enjoy yourself. When you work, the rest of the world should stop. And I don't mean that you should work 365 days a year. You cannot plan that “Tomorrow morning from 9:30 to 10:30 am I will think of a novel hypothesis.” All my life, I have never been an organized, steady worker, but when I work, at that time I'm completely focused on what I'm doing—whether it's writing a manuscript or analysing a particularly recalcitrant data set. At that point in some sense the rest of the world ceases to exist.

Nowadays, people view science too much as a career. I wish people would view science the way a classical musician views music. Of course singers earn money by singing, but they don't think of it as a profession the way working in a bank is a profession. If your only aim is to publish in high impact journals, that can give you some measure of success within the parameters of the system. But I feel there are much more interesting ways of getting one's kicks in science.

What are the most frequent misconceptions that you encounter regarding your work? Which questions do you dread?

The question I don't like, but get quite often, is how is your work important to the upliftment of human society. Science is seen too much through utilitarian lenses. The purpose of science is to understand. Harnessing that understanding to practical use requires a very different mind- and skill-set.

The most frequent misconception nowadays is that every causal explanation in biology must coalesce to one or a few genes. This position is brainwashed into students by the time they come to grad school and does a great disservice to biology.

Can you talk a little about your own approach to mentoring?

Mentoring, to me, is the most important thing any of us ever do as academicians. Mentoring is the essence of our existence as a link in the continuing chain of human knowledge. It is not about giving a grad student a good problem to work on: it is about helping the student discover his or her own good problem. As Khalil Gibran said so beautifully: "If he (i.e. a teacher) is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind."

Ultimately, mentoring is about sharing. You share the logic of how you approach a problem, probing for the right fault line at which to attack. Too often, research supervisors just tell students what to do without really explaining why, and if the student asks why, it becomes an ego problem for the supervisor because it is interpreted as having their judgment questioned. People need to be encouraged to discover their own style of doing science. It is important to transmit to the mentee a whole world view, rather than just a set of scientific techniques.

Alongside evolutionary biology, you have found time to write Urdu poetry and study Indian history. How do your other pursuits feed into your research? How do you balance time?

I don't think poetry feeds directly into science, or vice versa. Perhaps, at a more transcendent level, the spirit of poetry informs the spirit in which I do science. Science has its own beauty—there are models and formalisms that are astonishingly beautiful, as well as experiments that are beautiful in a way that makes you go vaah as if you had just read or heard a superb couplet.

I don't balance time well. I cannot do things like say I will work on a manuscript before lunch and write a poem or read philosophy after lunch. I work episodically on all things, whether science or other interests. When I am in the frame of mind for something I become immersed in it, to the exclusion of other things.

What are your most and least favourite parts of your job?

Most favourite: teaching. Least favourite: listening in meetings to self-important people pontificate about what ails Indian science.

What is the best advice you have ever gotten?

From my mother: Jo kaam karo, theek se karo, ya phir mat karo. If you do something, do it well. Otherwise don't do it at all.

Mahzarin Banaji is Richard Clark Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. On 6^th October, 2015 she gave a talk at National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bengaluru based on her book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, co-authored with Anthony Greenwald. Blindspot discusses ‘hidden biases’ that all of us carry as a result of our social experiences - biases related to gender, ethnicity, religion, social class, physical traits of people, etc. After the talk, Hari Sridhar emailed Mahzarin a few questions about the implications of her findings for the way we run academia.

Reposted from INNGE blog

In your talk at NIAS, you said that interviews are the wrong way to compare candidates when hiring for a job (or a PhD programme). Can you tell us why you think so?

No doubt, interviews provide unique and even valuable information. But interviews also provide a great deal of irrelevant and even biasing information. Without knowledge, the interviewer is unable to separate the information that is actually a predictor of success versus information that is irrelevant and even pernicious. For example, preferences for those who are like us or share our beliefs is a powerful bias. In addition, stereotypes based on physical appearance, the degree of slickness of presentation, and categories of gender, ethnicity, community, caste, religion, social class, age, and language are given weight even when they may not be good predictors of performance.

Do you suggest that we do away with face-to-face interviews altogether? Or, are there ways in which interviews can be modified to reduce/eliminate bias?

There may well be ways of getting rid of interviews altogether, but in many instances, a candidate’s ability to speak and communicate is part of the hiring decision. In this case, how might we get such information? One possibility is that a face-to-face interview is conducted by a non-decision maker whose job is to pose a specific set of questions and simply pay attention to the skill of communication. That information may be added to other data contained in the resume. It may be possible in such a case to not have the decision-maker meet with the candidate at all, but to use the communication score as input along with the resume. This is not fool-proof of course, because the person testing communication skills will also be influenced by physical beauty, etc. But if they are trained only to attend to one feature (i.e., communication skill) it may be possible to get an assessment that is lower in bias.

I am not saying that resumes contain all the relevant information at all, or that they alone should be trusted. In fact, I would be in favour of doing away with resumes submitted by candidates and for these to be replaced by a form that all applicants complete. That way, the university or company gets to decide which variables are important for selection rather than candidates making that assessment. If one's family has been in the ‘business’ of crafting and submitting resumes for a few generations such a person will naturally have tacit knowledge about how to produce an effective resume. If you want to create an equal playing field, all candidates should have to provide only the information required on a form. That way I don’t need to know your marital status or what you do in your spare time, items that often appear on a resume. Application forms should also be designed in such a way that more precise information is elicited about what exactly a person did to acquire the experience they say they have. For example, a candidate notes on her resume:

• Responsible for development & maintenance of an integrated digital strategy with objectives of Lead generation, Service Visibility, Brand Building and Thought Leadership. Oversee campaign management, Adwords, SEM and content strategy.
• Identified market opportunities, analyse customer needs and turn these into product requirements.

How is a decision-maker to know from this what exactly the person has done, how deep their role was, and how effective they were? We need to move to a process where the resume is replaced by an application form that seeks information in depth about actual work done, and for us not to be satisfied with such general and even vacuous statements.

Do you think these blindspots also affect other aspects of academia, e.g. peer-review of papers and grant proposals?

Whenever biasing information is present, and especially if it is not acknowledged as being biasing, we must remain open to the possibility that it may play a role in our decision making.

It is often difficult to keep peer-reviewed papers and grant proposals fully blind, but to the extent they can be, it is a reasonable strategy. Even the institution to which an individual belongs has been shown to change the favourability of peer review.

Do you think academia is doing enough to tackle bias and prejudice?

Those who belong to institutions of higher learning tend to think of themselves as unmotivated by concerns other than the pursuit of truth. They are indeed people who care less about making money, because many academics could indeed be employed in ways that would allow them to make substantially more money. For these reasons, perhaps, and because we do not have good measures or regular analysis of where our decisions were right or wrong, members of academia can hold on to the myth that they are not biased. In my experience, although universities and research institutions have come to see that their own decision making needs to be examined, it is those in the private sector who are the most aware — because they can see how biases based on group membership can cost them their bottom line and with immediate impact.

Psychologists, as a community, are probably much more aware of these issues. Does that also make them less prone to these biases?

I don’t think so. A study by Tony Greenwald and Eric Schuh showed that citation bias (in this case, the extent to which authors cite members of their own ethnic/religious community) exists even in a secular country like the United States. And such bias was greater among those who studied the topic of prejudice! That’s maybe because of a lack of awareness of bias, and those who study it feeling that they are outside the fray of bias.

How should an academician deal with his or her biases, so that they don't affect the professional decisions he or she makes?

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is a structural biologist well known for his work on the ribosome, for which he shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Born in India to scientist parents, he moved to the US to pursue graduate studies in Physics. His career has seen many changes—a switch from physics to biology, and several relocations from Ohio to San Diego, Yale, Brookhaven, Utah, and finally, the UK. He is currently the Head of the Structural Studies Division at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge and will take office as the President of the Royal Society in December. He comes across as scholarly and soft-spoken, yet frank and forthright. In conversation with Harini Barath and Akshat Rathi from Quartz at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, he reminisces about the changes in his career, talks about his engagement with India and his opinion of Indian science and gives us a glimpse of his plans at the Royal Society.

Your career has seen a lot of change, both geographically as well as in your field of study. Yet, with all this flux in the background, you seem to have been single-mindedly interested in solving one question. How did you choose this question? And what kept you going in your pursuit of the answer?

The initial choice was partly accidental. When I wanted to switch to biology I decided to go to graduate school again. During this time, I chanced upon an article by Don Engelman and Peter Moore about how they were applying a physical technique to study ribosome structure. I felt that I had acquired enough background in biology by then and thought I was ready for a postdoc. So I contacted Don and he said they had a position in collaboration with Peter Moore for looking at the ribosome. Peter offered me the postdoc and that’s how I ended up working on ribosomes.

Of course, I knew the ribosome was very important, but I also knew it was a really difficult problem. I knew it wasn’t going to be solved in the next year, and certainly not during my postdoc. But I thought it was a problem that was worth getting trained at. I was also intrigued by this technique of neutron scattering, which turns out to be a somewhat limited technique.

When I went off and set up my own lab I worked a lot on chromatin structure. But I also developed a new angle to look at ribosomes. I went off and learned crystallography. I was 40 years old. And I then started looking at pieces of the ribosome with crystallography, and so I maintained this sort of constant interest in the ribosome, but I kept on changing the way by which I approached it.

It is interesting that you studied crystallography at the age of 40. Would you say it proved invaluable to your work?

That wasn’t such a profound decision. You could see if you were using a technique that is limited both in the sorts of problems it can study and in the kind of information it can provide, you act. I’d used neutrons to publish a lot of papers, some in high profile journals, but I could see that I had sort of skimmed off what I could and it was getting harder to do really interesting things. So if I wanted to stay in neutrons, I would be the kind of scientist who has a hammer, looking to solve problems where a nail would be useful.

I was interested in the ribosome. I wanted to ask what I could do to answer how the ribosome works. My tenure committee asked me what I would you do if they granted tenure, and I said the first thing I would do is to go on sabbatical to learn crystallography. I knew that’s where the big advances were going to be in my field. To their credit, and to my good luck and they gave me tenure anyway. And that’s what I did.

I think that going on sabbatical is a very good way to learn because during that year you’re doing nothing but immersing yourself in this new technique with no distractions. So it was actually a big turning point. At the MRC Laboratory, I also learnt what it’s like to do really important science; to always think about what is the important question in your field, rather than thinking what’s the next experiment I can do. That way of doing science is really essential if you want to do first grade science.

As a scientist, how do you evaluate somebody who comes up to you and says, “I’m interested in this field or problem, but I have absolutely no background.” It’s a difficult thing to do as a mentor or recruiter. From another perspective, what is your advice to a scientist who wants to make a switch and wants to approach a mentor for a job?

You have to bring something to the mentor’s lab. For instance, I applied to biology labs when I was a physicist. The people who wrote back to me probably did so because they were using a physical technique like neutron scattering, where a physics background could help. So I would bring the kind of skill that maybe a biochemist wouldn’t have, but I wanted to learn something else. So if somebody could bring some complementary skill that might be useful, then you’d consider them.

However, I often I get these applications, where they’ll say, “I’ve been working on pathogenesis in wheat and I’m interested in ribosome structure.” Or sometimes not even that; simply “I’m very interested in your lab.” You know that they’re sending this to hundreds of labs and those things don’t make any sense.

You have been visiting India regularly over the last few years and you have a visiting position at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. What is extent of your engagement with research and education in India? Do you plan to take it forward in the coming years?

My engagement with India has always been at an individual level. The reason that I started visiting IISc is because there is a scientist there whom I respect and like. It was a nice way to reconnect with India. Then I started giving lectures and engaging with students and young scientists there. I also started visiting a few other Institutes, though not as extensively as with the IISc.

What is your opinion of the level of scientific research in India?

I have to say that the Institutes I have visited are the cream of the crop. So my view of Indian science is obviously skewed by that. But, if you go to your typical State University, and I’ve done that also, then you find that they have very poor infrastructure, very poor funding, and a rather low level of research, usually very incremental. I worry about the breadth of the Indian scientific enterprise. I think there’s not enough investment in training people properly. There’s divorce between research and education, by putting research in central institutes and leaving universities to fend for themselves. It didn’t used to be the case. It used to be that some of the best science was done in these old, traditional universities that were established by the British.

How do you think things can be improved?

The Government is trying to restore things by creating the Indian Institutes for Science Education and Research (IISERs). I’ve visited two IISERs and I was impressed by both of them. I think that is a very good idea. But of course, you need many more high level institutions for a country of a billion people. State Universities need to have better faculty who know what good research is. Otherwise undergraduates as a whole are not going to be exposed to very good science. That takes a lot of investment. If you look at the difference in investment between India and China, for instance, it’s a stark difference even when you correct for the fact that China has a bigger economy. When I go to China, I see a country that, in some ways, has caught up with the West; perhaps not with the very best of the West, but certainly with the average. I don’t see that in India, except for very few elite institutions.

So funding is one way to solve the problem. And the other way is to balance research and education?

Absolutely. Most countries do, and certainly Britain is a real example in this regard. Britain has a balance between Research Institutes (like the MRC Lab where I work) and some very well funded University programs. I think you need both, because the two can do different kinds of science. For instance, we can engage in very long term science, and often universities, with their turnover of students and so on cannot always do that, although they do that too sometimes. And I think they’re complementary. It’s the kind of scientific infrastructure that a country like India needs to create.

To promote universities, you have to attract talent. How can you get a young scientist to take that leap and become a faculty member at a place with possibly low funding?

Firstly, I think it’s not fair to ask a talented young scientist to go somewhere where his/her career is going to be killed. But then you have the problem that good people won’t go to these places. So the only way you can do that is by jumpstarting a place. And State Governments can help with this. They can provide matching funds, or even a majority of the funds. They can say, we want to make this University in our state a Center of Excellence in this particular area. We’re going to put a lot of money into it and attract this one senior person who is known to be very good to help recruit younger scientists.

This leads to another problem. Senior scientists need to know when to step down gracefully. And their goal should be to promote people who’ll take over from them. There are very few Institutions in India that do this. In my job as Head of Division at the MRC Lab of Molecular Biology for the last 10 years, we have done a lot of recruiting. Whenever I recruit, the question I ask is “Is this person likely to replace me one day?” And if the answer is yes, that’s the sort of person I want. And we do everything possible to make sure their careers flourish. That’s the kind of thing senior scientists have to do, and don’t always. There are exceptions, and I think the National Center for Biological Sciences in particular is a role model for this, where when the new Director comes in, there’s no interference or influence from the old Director. That’s happened twice now. So that’s a good role model.

This is a good excuse to talk about your next position, at the Royal Society. What legacy would you like to leave, if legacy is the right word to use?

It’s a little premature to ask me because I don’t take up office until December, but I have put on record a number of things I would like. One is to increase support for science from the Government, and to increase public awareness and interest in science. Another thing is to work with other organisations to help raise the standards of education, especially in schools, of science. Another thing is to make sure that whenever there are difficult issues, the Royal Society engages productively in getting the best expert opinion on these issues, and producing good policy statements both for Government and the public.

Of course, another aspect in which I am interested, as somebody who was born in India, is to engage with other countries, especially to foster exchange and collaborations. One idea is to try and get support for exchange programs between Indian scientists and students and British Institutions. I think that would be great. Let’s say an Indian scientist is working on a particularly Indian problem, maybe a pathogen or an Indian plant, but they have need for some technical expertise, which some lab in Britain is an expert in. That would be an ideal case, where they’re taking an interesting problem and getting some complementary skill.

Finally, what one advice would you give to young scientists?

A version of this interview first appeared in Quartz India.

How and when did you get interested in issues related to scientific misconduct? Was it triggered by a particular incident?

I grew up with the belief that science was a peculiarly ethical enterprise; fabrication, falsification or plagiarism—the most frequently discussed forms of misconduct—would be practically unknown among scientists. If they occurred at all, they would not mislead others for long, thanks to the supposed self-correcting mechanisms of science. When in college, I came to learn that things were not always like this. Reading about the Piltdown Man hoax made an impression. Many years later, the book “Betrayers of Truth” forcefully brought home the point that doing science often turns into an occupation like any other. As a journal editor, I attended a conference on scientific ethics. That is when the long provenance of scientific misconduct and its world-wide prevalence became apparent to me. It became apparent that as much as ideals, scientists too are motivated by considerations of personal gain, status, etc. Scientific misconduct does occur, as a means to some other end.

Having said that, it is probably true that there is significantly less misconduct in the practice of science than in other human endeavours; not that that is any consolation. One reason behind the amount of talk about it is that it is—fortunately—considered an aberration. People are horrified by scientific misconduct in a way that they are not when they hear of misconduct among politicians, say.

In a 2008 editorial in the Journal of Biosciences, Dr. Mukunda and you speak of three forms of misconduct in science—fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. Do you think all three forms are on the rise?

Certainly the perceived extent of misconduct is on the rise. One hears a lot more of plagiarism than fabrication or falsification, but the latter two are also harder to detect. There are other sorts of misconduct too, for example those involving conflicts of interest. They seem to be more common than before, in science as in other areas. A blatant instance would be to submit a grant application and also serve on the committee that evaluates it.

Could the perception that plagiarism is rising be, at least partially, due to our being able to detect it better?

Yes, it could. The Internet plays two roles here. The huge number of scientific papers being published and easy online access to others’ work must make it easier for people to be tempted to copy from others. The enormous amount of material available affords a reasonable expectation of escaping detection. On the other hand there are increasingly sophisticated tools available for spotting plagiarism and more cases get found out than before.

What could be causing a rise in scientific misconduct?

The perceived rise in scientific misconduct has gone in parallel with the remarkable expansion in the population of scientists in the second half of the 20th century, the emergence of science as an activity performed by large groups, the increase in public funding for research (as opposed to teaching) and the role played by public acclaim in influencing the view that scientists and institutions have of themselves. As a consequence of these factors, there is intense competition for employment in places that offer a suitable research environment. Then there is the fact that the standards for assessing achievement today—not only in the natural

sciences—emphasise quantity over quality. Norms that rely on numbers are easier to subvert than those that make use of old-fashioned criteria such as reading publications and leaning on the opinion of knowledgeable people. Management and public relations skills gain importance. The temptation to cut corners rises; worse, one can remain oblivious of the fact that one is doing something improper. Sheer curiosity, which should be the main reason for doing science, soon gets stifled.

School pupils have long carried out ‘cut and paste’ operations with the help of newspapers and other printed materials for doing homework assignments. As often as not, it is their parents who do so, adding a layer of socially sanctioned misconduct. The Internet lends itself to be viewed as a gigantic newspaper from which one can cut snippets to make up a pasteboard story. It is assumed to be as permissible as using Calculus and not citing Newton and Leibniz—which no one does of course.

Do you think some of these could be cases of ‘honest mistakes’, self-plagiarism, for example?

Self-plagiarism is a problem. It can take place for a trivial reason. When you follow a standard procedure in experiments, it is difficult to come up each time with substantially different descriptions of what you have done. But it can also involve the presentation of previously published findings or analysis as new, as part of an effort to make your publication record more impressive than it really is. That is serious.

Can journals do more to tackle scientific misconduct? Can you tell us a little about what the Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS) has done in this regard?

Many journals have been doing what they can. Some routinely put texts and images through software that can check for plagiarism or manipulation. The volume of submissions is making this an increasingly difficult measure to implement. Reviewers are overwhelmed by requests to assess data-heavy manuscripts within ridiculously short times. That opens the field for more dubious journals that offer quick publication with little or no oversight.

In the editorial you referred to, IAS assured that “every case of suspected plagiarism” in its journals would be “investigated objectively and transparently by the journal editors as speedily as possible” and “steps [would be taken] commensurate with the seriousness of the case”. If plagiarism was demonstrable, the Academy could take more than one course of action—including rejecting the paper and “bring[ing] such instances to the attention of the author’s employers, funding agencies and (where applicable) the original author whose work has been plagiarised”. One paper had to be withdrawn after publication during my time as editor of Journal of Biosciences and there were cases in which submissions were turned down because part of the contents were plagiarised.

Can institutions do more to counter scientific misconduct? Again, can you tell us a little about what IAS has done in this regard?

The head of a research group should take the lead. Unfortunately, group heads tend to be so driven by the desire to publish that sometimes they look the other way when there is a lapse in ethical behaviour—or worse, instigate it. IAS has set up a ‘Panel on Scientific Values’ to monitor lapses in scientific ethics, but only lapses committed by a Fellow, and that too if a complaint is made. After examining a case, it presents its report to the Council of the Academy along with recommendations for action. It is left to the Council to decide on what to do. Removal from the Fellowship would appear to be the most extreme penalty that can be imposed. I wonder whether the existence of the Panel has led to an increase in ethical behaviour among Fellows.

What about at the policy level? Is there a need for an ‘office of research integrity’, like in the US?

An ‘office of research integrity’ would be a useful regulator if it functions fairly. But your question touches on something that goes beyond misconduct in science. Policing and punishment can be effective when a society is reasonably homogeneous and cohesive, and most people accept most restrictions most of the time. If a society is riven by inequalities, as ours is, rules are often made by one set of people and enforced on another. The situation is tailor-made for fostering the notion that the system is unfair, and that could extend to opinions on how the

regulatory body functions. This line of thinking may appear irrelevant in the context of science. On the other hand, factors such as the prestige associated with the ranking of universities and research institutions, the pressure to boost them and the way in which funds are allocated, suggest otherwise.

Non-official bodies such as the Society for Scientific Values and Retraction Watch might be more effective. But journals and people in position of authority are notoriously reluctant to respond to complaints. So this route may not be all that successful either, because at most it can lead to shaming the individual (if that).

Depressing as it sounds, the combination of a regulatory body and more than one independent watchdog may work best.

What advice would you give young faculty in Indian universities and institutes with regard to research misconduct?

The pressure to ‘perform’ is most intense on junior faculty, especially when they are on probation. A young colleague told me recently that his university expects him to publish at least seven papers in five years during the pre-tenure period. This is a silly way to assess a scientist, because it does not pay attention to the quality of research, not to speak of activities such as teaching, communicating with the wider public, reviewing others’ papers and so on. It falls on institution leaders and department heads to protect young faculty from unrealistic expectations and help them retain a sense of self-confidence.

What steps should a ‘victim’ of plagiarism take?

After getting the facts straight, the first thing should be to write to the suspected plagiarist and ask for restitution. If that does not work, one should write to a potential adjudicating authority (head of department, vice-chancellor, journal, society). Legal redress is always available as the last resort. Much depends, however, on direction and leadership within the scientific community. The Society for Scientific Values has been open and forthright, but one has the impression that the bulk of the community is holding itself aloof from it.

What role does culture play in these issues?

As far as India is concerned, modern science is one of many imported cultural traits. But we tend to think of it as a universal pursuit that has freed itself from cultural moorings. Science in India (and for that matter in other non-Western countries) conforms to that view only in part, because our actions are influenced more by people than by rules or impersonal facts. It would be a worthwhile exercise to study the confrontation between norms of functioning expected in modern science and in our daily lives. “Uncommon sense” by Alan Cromer, “The twice-born” by Morris Carstairs and “The Indian half of Needham’s question” by R. Narasimha contain interesting speculations.

Many journals are now making it mandatory for authors to make raw data available. Do you think this is a step in the right direction, with regard to tackling misconduct?

Anuradha Lohia has served as Vice Chancellor of Presidency University since 2014. Founding CEO of the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance, her eyes are still brightest when she speaks of the everyday thrills of her work as a molecular parasitologist. We sit sheltered from the monsoon heat of Kolkata in her office as she speaks thoughtfully and with passion about the curious modes of cell division in Entamoeba histolytica, and what it means to be a woman in science.

What or who inspired you to become a scientist?

Nobody. I just knew I wanted to do biology. And why did I want to do biology? Biology and chemistry were the two subjects I really enjoyed in school, and then I started to study biology in college, and just continued with biology till my Masters. By the time I finished my Masters I knew that I wanted to do research.

At that time the way that biology was taught was quite superficial, in the sense that you learnt about taxonomy and you learnt about Mendelian genetics but you didn't really learn about the cell. I think that lack of learning incited a curiosity which drove me to ask. So it's really something that the subject and me had in conversation with each other. It wasn't a person. The subject was absolutely outstandingly fantastic.

I come from a very different family, where there weren't many academics. Only my mother was a social worker, and that too in the field of education for special children. I didn't have any inspiration per se either from friends or from family, or an outside person who I'd read about that was fascinating. No. I just did it from a very primal desire to study biology.

What is the most exciting research you have been involved in?

The most exciting research is what I've done for the last twenty years, trying to understand how entamoeba cells divide. What I've worked on is a protozoan parasite that causes disease in humans under specific conditions. I wasn't interested in the disease per se, but how these cells multiplied. When I first started working on it, cell division was on everybody's lips. A lot of work was coming out in yeast and humans about cell division. People could use genetic engineering to show that cell division was a progression of highly regulated events. If something went wrong at one stage either the cells stopped dividing or turned cancerous.

Entamoeba broke all rules. I could not observe that there were the same checkpoints or the same arrests or the same stages as in other eukaryotes. This was very puzzling, very frustrating, because you couldn't do genetics or mutational analysis in entamoeba. It was very difficult to handle in the lab. So we had to devise our own methods to study the organism.

Entamoeba is a parasite, so it knows how to survive under the most hostile conditions. It has the ability to change itself according to its milieu. We discovered that its genome could amplify itself a thousand times, and shrink itself a thousand times. It had different modes of cell division—for example, it used helper cells for midwife-assisted cell division. It also had independent cell division, where two parts of the cell could break off into equal or unequal halves, and nuclear partitioning could be equal or unequal. We found multipolar spindles in a fraction of the cells. At the same time, the same population could have standard bipolar separation. There were fan-like spindles, which could have lateral division. It was amazing.

Entamoeba has completely kept me on my toes, morning to night, for the last twenty-five years. Never a dull moment. It would change itself just when I thought I'd got it. It has been fascinating – a lovely journey. I think I've probably been able to scratch the tip of the iceberg and say it isn't like the model systems. It has its own sense.

Who have been your women role models – not necessarily in science?

My biggest role model was my mom. When I was born, we lived in a joint family where no woman had studied beyond class six or seven. My mother finished her PhD after I was born. This was by sheer grit and determination, because not only did she have to change the mindset of the family, she had to still fulfil the requirements of doing a PhD, which we know are very harsh. And she never gave up her duties at the domestic front. We came from humble beginnings, so it wasn't that there was a lot of support staff, or that there were other people helping my mother. She would do this and that, and I grew up thinking this is normal. I never thought she was doing anything special. It was only when I did my PhD and I found the crunch very strong that I realised it's very hard to maintain this.

She was an amazing role model—is an amazing role model. My mother still manages at eighty plus to run an institute for mentally handicapped children, which she set up herself, forty years ago. My only dream at one point of time was not to fall short of what she's done. I don't know if I've achieved it or not, but at least I've tried.

Another role model is my daughter, in a very reverse way. She was born while I was doing my PhD. Without her demanding it or saying anything, I knew I would have to become that [same] role model for her.

How difficult has it been for you to achieve a sustainable work-life balance? How can institutions help in this regard?

I think I was lucky because I grew up knowing that a work-life balance is very difficult. And I also knew I had no option but to have a work-life balance. It was ingrained in me as a child that both would go in parallel. For me, yes it was sustainable. Even when the going got rough, I managed. Sometimes one would take priority over the other—but it's not something I thought about. I just did it.

I feel that the help given by institutions should not be crippling. It should not make women feel that they can't do something on their own. Help should be given only when someone is really struggling. But yes, institutions can make it easier by having a creche for the child, or having flexible working hours.

In the research institutions that I went to, flexible working hours were a given. So I really didn't have an issue with that. In my case, I don't think a creche would have helped because I lived my life in a joint family. But there are nuclear families where the woman is looking after her child alone. There, a creche is essential. It would allow the woman to work for much longer.

Do you think women need to be mentored differently? Do young women benefit from older women mentors?

I think women need mentoring, and that female students need a different kind of mentoring than male students. Women have something innate in them that they don't think they're good enough, whereas really there is no such distinction. And men are brought up in most societies in a way that tells them that they're the greatest. This mental difference is what makes mentoring very useful for women. And I think older women are the best mentors, if they are positively inclined. You need a woman to tell you, “Yes you can do it. Look, I am doing it.”

Women [tend to] say, “Am I good enough? Will I publish as many papers? I have so many problems.” None of that. You just need someone to stand by you and say, “No, you're going to do it, and you're very good.”

I have benefited from mentoring, and tried to give it to my students and my daughter. And anyone else who asks for it. I'm happy to give it to them.

Do you think sexual harassment is an issue in Indian academia? How would you help a young women scientist in such a situation?

I have never faced it, but I do think sexual harassment is an issue in Indian academia. I have always been part of the women's cell in my institute, and I have made sure that women who have been harassed have got justice. The problem often is that the women themselves get so nervous they withdraw their complaints. They don't give it in writing. So then I go in as a mentor and tell them there's nothing to be scared of. Anyone being part of a sexual harassment cell must also be a part time counsellor, or arrange for counselling.

Women tend to believe other people about themselves. If anyone tells a woman, “Look, you won't be able to do this,” this woman carries it in her subconscious, goes home and says, “I know I won't be able to do it.” She doesn't know it from herself. She knows it because half the world has told it to her.

This is where mentoring and counselling go hand in hand.

What are the structural roadblocks that impede progress of women in science?

Family. The time that you start wanting to have a family is also the time when you have to build your career. The biological clock will tick, and stop. But if the career path could be extended so that the slope of the curve is not steepest at the same time as the family period, it would change things. So if I could get into my productive phase once my children have been born and got into school, and then focus on this, it would be easier.

For women, promotion schemes could be skewed if they're of childbearing age. If they don't have to follow the same promotion policies, I think women would do much better. And not just women – the entire work force would then do better, because you'd have more productive people, and women would not fall by the wayside.

Have things become better since you started your career? In what respects?

In every way. Society, people in the workplace – more and more women have come into the work force, and they realize how strong a force it is. And there's much more money out there for research. You don't have to fight as much as we did when we started our careers.

Also, women being in the workplace for sustainable periods of time has changed the mindset ever so slightly—but even that ever so slightly is a lot. I think it has definitely become better, and I can only see it becoming better and better.

What is one change that, in your opinion, would hugely benefit aspiring women scientists?

Think confident. Every single woman must know that she is wonderful, that she is good, and that she doesn't need anyone else to tell her that. And anyone else who says anything less than that is a liar.

What is the best advice you have ever received?

One advice I did get was when the director of my institute in which I was doing my PhD said, “You must go for a postdoc.” I had assumed that after having a small child during my PhD, I would not be able to go for a postdoc. I was living in a conservative joint family, and the family was a business family. I never thought I would have a career as a scientist by going to the USA or elsewhere. I just thought I'd continue to do my science in whatever lab I am in.

Once that decision [to go abroad for a postdoc] was taken, family fell into place. People resisted, people criticized. I ignored them. It takes a lot, but I did it. And I'm very happy I did, because it made a difference. Not just to myself – to my daughter, to many friends and to many women. And to many men who had to start thinking that their wives are their equals, or more. And that I'm proud of.

Hari: Do you think there is value, for the science itself, in different people/labs studying exactly the same question? Maybe, as a form of validation?

Renee: This would be a waste of time if the two groups don't have completely different perspectives on the problem. Otherwise a waste of time and resources and not entirely relevant. Let's take C. elegans. Many labs study C. elegans, but you will not find two labs studying the same problem in exactly the same way. It would be inappropriate for the people involved because you would get two identical research papers, two identical streams of research being done and it wouldn't make sense. It depends on the question that is at the heart of the system, and whether you have a new completely new perspective that has not been thought of before.

Hari: What about value in terms of stronger support for a particular result? Won't two studies done exactly the same way and finding the same results give us greater confidence in the finding, i.e. greater certainty about its validity?

Renee: It depends on whether the first study was done in an adequate manner or not. If there is reason to believe that it was "iffy" and could be improved, then yes. But again there comes the issue of ethics: if X has invested in doing a study and would like to continue in that line and then if you have another lab that wants to validate the study, refuses to believe what X has done, and wants to do exactly the same thing, that may be possible if there is good understanding between the labs. There could be all kinds of issues; e.g. X realises that it is a preliminary study and has plans to expand it, do it better, demonstrate the phenomenon better with more replicates, increase the number of sites, etc. X may be fully aware the study is preliminary and may have even declared in a publication that it requires validation and that validation is ongoing. So I don't see any point in someone else repeating the same thing. Unless you have reason to believe that something in the study was not right and it needs to be improved. Again there are ethical issues there too—the person who did the original study might wonder, why is my study not considered good enough? Why does it require re-validation? If it has problems, how did it get through peer review and get published? In general, I think it is inappropriate and detrimental to one’s own career to do exactly the same thing someone else has done. Unless it is at different points in time. For example, if something was done 50 years ago and conditions have now changed, then you might want to go back to the exact same site and do exactly the same thing and see if you are getting similar results. That is not validation but asking if findings hold true given the changed environmental conditions after 50 years.

Hari: More generally, would it be right to say that you think it's better if different scientists work on different problems instead of many scientists working on the same problem?

Renee: It depends on the complexity of the research problem. If it is a very complex problem, e.g., this whole issue of the hologenome, which is a very hot topic these days, i.e., trying to find out how the bacterial flora of your gut influences your phenotype and interacts with your genotype. Now, if one lab says the hologenome is my territory and nobody dare get into the hologenome, that is foolish. There are millions of strains of bacteria in the human gut, there are billions of humans each with a unique genetic background. This is not a problem that can be tackled by say, even 50 labs. You probably need many more labs to even begin to understand such a problem. So, it is very context-dependent and especially depends on the complexity of the problem. A familiarity with a research problem is not a good enough reason to say I will continue to work on it forever.

Hari: If I, an outsider, gets an idea for a research project after reading a paper that comes out of your lab, what, according to you, would be the ethical thing for me to do?

Renee: If it is on the same system, you should contact me and tell me you are thinking about this. If it is on a related system, it may not matter. You should ask me what I feel about it, or if I want to collaborate with you. You should check whether I feel like you are stepping on my toes, whether I already had the same idea. This is how, ideally, scientists should deal with these potential conflicts of interest. I am happy to say that it is widely practiced. I have had many such queries. In some cases I have said that I am planning to work along the same lines proposed. In others, I have had no conflict because the idea proposed was not something I was working on or was planning to work on in the future. I have also had some unpleasant situations where people have wanted to step in and the boundaries had to be indicated. It would be inappropriate for someone to start a project that overlaps a lot with someone else's ongoing project because it is also very likely that the former's proposals and papers will go to the latter for review, with unfortunate consequences that may include rejection of the paper or proposal even though there is nothing wrong with the science. Most journals and funding agencies ask specifically about conflicts of interest when they assign reviewers. So it is best to avoid overlap, unless, like I said earlier, the problem is so complex, e.g. the human genome, that it requires many research groups to solve it.

Hari: With the move towards more open science, to greater sharing of ideas, data and protocols and more collaboration, do you think people's thinking on these issues will also change?

Renee: In an earlier conversation we had, you had said that once a paper is published, the data and leads that come out of it are available to everyone. I don't think that these leads should necessarily be up for grabs, unless they are universal problems, which many groups could be working on to solve, e.g. the genetic code, or the structure of DNA. Even today, ethical behaviour behooves you to write to the authors of the paper if you want to work on leads within the same system. And it is so much easier now with email and the internet. Earlier one had to use snail mail or meet people at conferences, but there were also fewer groups so it was easier to keep track of what everyone was doing. There was a lot more personal contact. Today they are just names and faces on the internet.
I think the move to more open science has different motivations. One push is from people who are now focused on meta-analysis. But I also think that a large push is from journals wanting to protect themselves from fraudulent data. I am not completely convinced that it is only in the interest of the greater common good that people are starting to make their data available. Nowadays many journals are making it mandatory. There are many partners in this game who need to be protected—journals, publishers, funding agencies....not only student and supervisor. Therefore this move towards openness will not really have much bearing on what's considered ethical behaviour in issues like ownership of research ideas and projects. Each scientist or research team has a space and you have to respect that space. If I have to constantly watch over my shoulder, I may even be impelled to hurry and do bad science, or even make up stuff because I am running this race with somebody at my heels. I am not saying competition is bad but you don't necessarily have to do exactly the same thing someone else is doing. Of course, like I said earlier, in certain domains, e.g. drug discovery or working out the structure of DNA, there is a particular generic problem that has to be solved and there are many people working simultaneously on it; for some people the gestational period of the problem may be similar, and they may all be competing for that one critical piece of information to put it all together. So, one needs to decide on what is appropriate on a case-by-case basis. But in general, it is important to be ethical, to check, not automatically assume that everything is up for grabs, to realise that people have invested in these ideas and perhaps have an advantage over you because of the greater gestation time. If you don't realise all of this, you might jump into a problem thinking you can solve it but it might turn out to be detrimental to your career, in more ways than one.

Hari: For a graduated PhD student about to embark on a postdoc, there is, of course, the temptation of continuing to work on a familiar topic, which one has become more and more interested in. But, if a student obtained a PhD by working within an already ongoing research programme in a lab, is it okay for him/her to continue working on the same topic after moving to a new lab? What are your views on this? Do you think that students need to think of issues of research propriety in such cases?
Renee: As you rightly framed the question, the lab in which the student has done a PhD has developed a framework of a particular system or a particular type of investigation and has plans to continue those investigations with subsequent students. The lab has a story and has invested time and effort in that story and so it is often assumed that that story will continue within that particular lab. And this is world-wide. I wouldn't call it a research territory, because territoriality has negative connotations. It is an issue of investment by a particular lab. Because, when you invest in a system, there could be many offshoots that come up resulting from the investigation. Offshoots or "direct descending hypotheses". Obviously, then, that particular lab would like to continue working on those questions because of the prior investment in time, connections, the network, etc. that has been built up.
The issue is slightly different when a student comes into a lab with his or her own idea, is able to independently generate his or her own funding to pursue such an idea, and if the mentor doesn't mind hosting such a student. I have seen this happen quite frequently in the US system, for example, where graduate students have the opportunities for applying independently for grants such as from the NSF (National Science Foundation); these are sizable grants and can support all the research that a student might want to do without in any way impinging on research funds or priorities of the mentor. If the mentor feels that the student is bright and can independently pursue his or her own research trajectory, in such cases, it is usually an unwritten rule that the project really belongs to the student. In such cases, when the student leaves the lab, the investigator ideally should have no problem with that student continuing to pursue that particular project.
The other comment I would like to make—because you spoke about the transition from a PhD to a postdoc—is this: it is important to think of a PhD merely as a passport. A PhD is just to give you sufficient training and to teach you the fundamentals before you launch out on your own. It is to give you basic skills in thinking, formulating a problem, writing about a problem, and the discipline involved in bringing all this together. So that, at the end of your PhD, you have your passport and the world is now your oyster, in a certain sense. In fact, in some countries—France for example—students are actively discouraged from working on the same topic for a PhD and their postdoc work. This is ideally how a PhD–postdoc transition should be thought of — it is just a set of steps in training, steps in exposure, widening your perspective, which is very important, and then giving you the opportunity to make your ultimate choice as to what do you really want to focus or specialise on. Now, if you want to do [for a postdoc] exactly what you did as a PhD student, obviously, there will be a conflict of interest. If you want to work on exactly the same system and exactly the same aspect that somebody has put a lot of time or effort into, it would count as a conflict of interest. Problems require their space. If you have to keep looking over your shoulder all the time, that will affect the quality of the research. It also depends on the kind of question. For example, there is no conflict of interest if two groups are studying tigers in Bandipur and Bandhavgarh if there is no one fundamental question about tigers they are trying to understand. Information on tigers from different places is useful independently. But if there is one fundamental question that is being addressed on the same system, then there is a conflict of interest if different groups are studying the same question.

Hari: Let’s try to understand the contours of some potential conflicts of interest. The problem is clear when two groups want to work on exactly the same specific problem on the same taxon. But what if the same question is addressed using a different taxon? Or, if the question is not exactly the same but closely-related? How does one draw the boundaries of this conflict area? Do you think there is a need for general guidelines or should it be worked out on a case-by-case basis?
Renee: Case-by-case, because so many factors are at play—novelty of idea, how did the idea come about? Was it a joint discussion? In many cases a student might be the "originator" of the idea but it may have been the environment that facilitated the idea, i.e. the student might never have had the idea without that enabling environment. Or the idea might have been simmering for a long time and required some nurturing for it to emerge fully. The period of gestation of an idea is very important. It is possible that many people are at the same gestational stage and require just that one spark to take it forward. But if that priming hasn't happened, the spark will be ineffective. To use a biblical reference, it would be like casting pearls before swine. Therefore it is very important to take the ontogeny of an idea into consideration.

Hari: You said that if a student brings his/her own ideas and money into a PhD then it is fine for him/her to continue the project into a postdoc. Such a student, you feel, is clearly the owner of the project and ideas that come out of it. But even in a situation where a student joins an existing research programme, doesn’t the student have some ownership over the ideas that develop during the course of the PhD? After all, these ideas are likely to reflect the intellectual inputs of both student and supervisor. Shouldn’t ownership issues be negotiated between student–supervisor or student–institute?
Renee: There is an unwritten law or rule. Even in terms of the authorship sequence on papers, the supervisor is usually the corresponding author or the senior author who is ultimately responsible for the study—flaws, faults, good things, bad things— the buck stops at the supervisor. If there is a case of fraud, the student is not going to bear the major brunt. Yes, he or she might get punished but it is the supervisor who will be hounded and maybe even suspended. So the major responsibility lies at the supervisor's door. If you turn this thing around, then since the supervisor is holding the responsibility for the entire project or idea, it is natural that the supervisor also has greater ownership over it. Of course, there is always this cross talk going on between student and supervisor, the idea develops all the time. Every problem is in that sense a joint problem. How much is the supervisor's idea, how much the student's, becomes a little murky after a while. It is very hard to say 50-50 or 80-20; it becomes difficult. In cases where the student comes with an independent idea into the lab and the student has brought in funding then, ideally, it is the student who should be the corresponding author or there should be joint corresponding authors. And then the responsibility lies with the student, both for the good aspects of the work and for mistakes, fraud etc., if any. This is the most straightforward way in which to decide ownership, based on responsibility.

Hari: So though the intellectual contributions of student and supervisor are difficult to separate, the lab and the supervisor have greater ownership over ideas coming out of a PhD?
Renee: You must remember that it is a dual-growth process. Both student and supervisor grow during the course of a PhD, and the supervisor grows not only through what the student contributes but because of other factors also, like interacting with other individuals. In other words, the supervisor's understanding of a problem also grows independent of a student's contribution. That's why I say it is quite hard to separate the contribution of student and supervisor. It is really hard to say I own 40% or 50%. It is just not possible.

Hari: The student–supervisor relationship is inherently unequal, and the problem is exacerbated because students feel that way, and don't feel empowered enough to speak up. In such a situation, do you think there is value to these issues being discussed and agreed upon right at the start of the PhD? Maybe, even formalised through a set of guidelines in student handbooks?
Renee: It is important but much of it depends on the lab culture. I would hate to feel that students feel powerless because, in my opinion, students can do a lot collectively. At least in my lab, just speaking personally, we really talk about the collective. We even have a term for it —"syncephalon", and we— my students and I—are the "syncephalites". Everything is bounced off many minds, so it is no longer just the student and supervisor; it is the whole lab, and the student and supervisor are embedded in this syncephalon. In such a situation, it is even more difficult to separate contributions. A bright idea, which a student has, might have come from the combined ideas of many others in the lab, who have created the environment where such an idea can be born. So, that's why I am always disturbed when I hear about students feeling powerless or that there is a lot of asymmetry. Yes, there will be some amount of asymmetry because the supervisor has to sign on the thesis. But there are mechanisms to deal even with that in an institute like ours, where if the relationship between student and supervisor breaks down, there is a mechanism to bypass the supervisor, if necessary. A student really should not feel unempowered and if he or she does feel so, then there is a problem with the lab/labs that the student is embedded in. I agree with you, entirely, that this is something that should be discussed. It is a little bit of a sensitive issue. When I gave a talk on ethical practices in science in CES a year ago, the same question was posed to me and I remember responding that both students and mentors have responsibilities towards each other; an equal responsibility.

Hari: What about issues of authorship, data and sample ownership, etc.; do you think these should be discussed and agreed upon at the start of a PhD?
Renee: I think so, I agree. Data from a lab-initiated, lab-funded project really belongs to the lab; and so do specimens. If there is a unique situation, it should be negotiated by the student, e.g. if a student specialises in a group of organisms on which the lab has no expertise and the lab is providing only conceptual backing, the student could say "I would like to take my specimens when I leave". But, like I said earlier, there is the issue of funding; if the lab contributes funds, the lab has ownership. These issues can be tricky if the student does not have a clear-cut idea of what he or she is coming into the lab with. If a student comes into the lab as an apprentice—and most students do come into the lab to learn, as apprentices—then only under some very unusual circumstances will he/she become the owner of a project. But if you come in as an expert, then you do have more negotiating power. Then it is up to you to use that negotiating power if you think it is appropriate, and if the lab is willing to allow you to use it.

In Part 2, Hari Sridhar and Renee Borges expand this discussion to research labs pursuing the same ideas, and open science.

Paleobiologist Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan, currently head of the Biological Sciences Department, University of Cape Town, South Africa, was in Bangalore to attend the Commonwealth Science Congress in November 2014. Winner of the Third World Academy of Science Prize for promotion of science (TWAS sub-Saharan African Prize for Popularization of Science), former President of the South African Women in Science and Engineering, South Africa's Woman of the Year in 2005, and author of two popular science books, this multi-faceted scientist chatted with about her passions and interests.

Not many people are familiar with paleobiology. Could you tell me about the field and your work in particular?

I'm a paleontologist, and a biologist. The particular area that I work in is called paleobiology. I use my understanding of bone structures of modern animals to make extrapolations to the fossil record.

When fossils are found, people try to identify and understand the fossil itself. But my research goes beyond that. I want to try and understand something about the animal when it was living—how long did it take to grow, what kind of factors affected its growth, did it have any disease, was it male or female.

If you look at the modern ecosystem, you can find animals, you can measure them, you can weigh them, you can do all these things, but for fossils, all you have are the bones. So I try to get as much information as possible from the bones, and one of the things I do is to look at the microscopic structure of bones. We can look at the histology and from that, we can make deductions about biology.

Besides your work, you have also invested a lot of time and effort in promoting science to a larger audience. What drives you?

My second book is called . This book is about is the history of life on earth from a perspective of the African continent. It's like a big picture story. The book was aimed at the high school level but can also be enjoyed equally by adults.One of my very big interests is to promote science through different platforms. To that end, I give lots of popular level talks to various audiences—children, women's groups, societies—and I have also written many popular articles. While I give many science talks, I also often talk about women in science, getting people interested in science and about how to communicate your research effectively. I have also written two books to popularize science.

After almost 150 years of studying African dinosaurs, there hasn't been a book about them. Most children are crazy about dinosaurs and yet when I talk to kids and ask them name a dinosaur from Africa, they don't know. That's what made me think that I must write my first book, " ".

Kids have so much information about the prehistoric world, it is unreal. They know the geological time, they know about predators and prey and the names of so many dinosaurs. Many of those who carry their interest in science further and become botanists and physicists start off with a love of dinosaurs. When children are excited about science, they enjoy it. Through that enjoyment, at that level, you can stimulate an interest in broader science. That is really what drives me—not to get everybody to become paleontologists, but rather to get people excited about science.

You mentioned that you give talks about women in science. You have also been the President of the South African Women in Science and Engineering for 5 years. What are the issues unique to women in science in Africa, if any?

South Africa certainly has unique issues. As you know, our country has the legacy of the apartheid. So for me, as an Indian woman, growing up in South Africa meant that there were certain restrictions—which universities I could attend, what I could do. If you look at the numbers of black women in science in South Africa, they are very few. In fact, in the University of Cape Town, which is one of the best universities in the country, I am the only full professor in the faculty of science who is a black woman. So, it was very, very restrictive.

I notice you say it was restrictive. Are things different now?

Certainly. Over the last ten years, maybe, there's been very quick change in terms of the numbers of women in senior levels. This is mainly because of the government initiatives in promoting women. There's a lot of money given to women in science now.

That is very heartening to hear. Are there particular measures that helped bring about this change?

When I was studying it was very difficult to get a bursary, it was very difficult to get fellowships. One had to study on loans. But today, the good thing is that there are fellowships targeted particularly for women, and targeted particularly for black people. If you are a woman and/or black person and if you do well, you can very easily get a scholarship to study. It has made a huge difference. If you talk to many of the students, you will see that many of them were able to come through the system simply because of scholarships to come into university.

The South African Women in Science and Engineering also has its own fellowships, particularly for women entering post graduate studies, because we realized that there was a gap at that level. It seemed like it was difficult for girls to continue to the honors level, but once they were in the field, to get a masters bursary or a PhD bursary was easy.

What is your advice for young women scientists embarking on their careers?

Many women think that they have to choose—that it has to be an either-or situation. Many of them think that there's no way I can be a good scientist—because you don't want to just be a scientist, you want to be good—and be a good mother. And that's what needs to be promoted—the idea that women actually can do both. The way to do that is to talk to women who have kids and find out how they balance their lives and tell that to the younger people.

When I used to be a member of the South African Women in Science and Engineering—I joined when my child was three months old and I used to take him to the meetings in his carrycot—I would sit and talk to these other women. I was a young academic and I learnt so much about how others coped, how they managed. I learnt the ropes of academia from these other women. Not so much from the people in my Department—the learning curve for me happened outside the Department. The network that you meet through a women's organization can be invaluable. It is really important to have that platform. For me, my personal growth as a woman and as a mother actually happened in that forum.