Entrepreneurship and innovation are key drivers of economic growth in a country. Entrepreneurs create new businesses that provide solutions for unmet needs and innovation fuels the creation of newer and more efficient solutions, technologies and products. Innovation coupled with entrepreneurship creates jobs, increases productivity and strengthens market dynamics thereby fostering economic growth. Entrepreneurship in the field of Life Sciences is blooming in India, or rather surging and it seems the weather has slowly become conducive to attempt and build some exciting innovations.

Ecosystem is shaping up to Support Deep-Science Innovations

Translation of scientific discoveries into products/applications requires a conducive ecosystem, where different stakeholders play a vital role in supporting young entrepreneurs (and start-ups). These stakeholders include but are not limited to: a) Funding Support, b) Academic Institutions/Clusters and c) Translation/Innovation Hubs.

A) Changing face of Early Funding Support for Entrepreneurship

Early stage support for exciting, risky ideas is crucial to foster entrepreneurship. It is a delight to see that over last 4-5 years, there have been many opportunities to support early-stage ideas in life sciences.

Dept. of Biotechnology, Govt. of India set up BIRAC (Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council), which has ignited a high number life science entrepreneurs and supported many start-ups for product development through its schemes like Biotechnology Ignition Grant (up to 50 lakhs), Biotechnology Industry Partnership Programme, Small Business Industry Research Initiative etc. Dept. of Science and Technology, Govt. of India, also has many successful initiatives to support early and late stage entrepreneurs and start-ups. In last 4 years, nearly 250 deep science-based ideas have been supported through early-stage funding schemes like BIRAC.

For non-government funding, several foundations have begun to support to early-stage ideas with societal impact, like the Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust and a few more. Recently, private funders have also built funds to support start-ups at early stage and development stage.

B) Strong Academic Institutions and Clusters

Strong academic institutions that do cutting-edge research, have extraordinary scientific talent and high-end infrastructure often become the hotbed of early ideas getting translated into socially important products/applications. This becomes much feasible in dense scientific communities/clusters like Cambridge, Oxford, San Francisco Bay Area Boston Bay Area etc. In India too, this has become slowly possible with the creation of clusters (Bangalore Life Science Cluster, Faridabad Bio Cluster and Mohali Bio Cluster), clusters in Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata and others.

C) Science Innovation and Translation Hubs

Innovation and Translation Hubs play a crucial role in taking these ideas to the next level for development, validation and deployment. These hubs act as enablers and work in closest proximity with start-ups as an innovation hub, incubator, accelerator, or research park etc. There are some exciting hubs in India, like at the IIMs, the IITs as well as in private place like IKP, T-Hub etc. In addition, there are hubs in pure Science sector too. For example, NCL has set up a Venture Centre and C-CAMP has set up a Bio-Incubator and Accelerator. There are other bio-incubators also being set up with the help of BIRAC in many parts of the country, that will provide early support to start-ups in technical and non-technical aspects.

Taking C-CAMP’s Perspective As An Example

Centre for Cellular & Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) is a Dept. Biotechnology, Govt. of India initiative and a member of the Bangalore Life Science Cluster (BLiSC), which includes National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS-TIFR) and Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine (inStem).

Considered one of the most successful hubs for technology-based innovation in India in the field of life sciences, C-CAMP has been an enabler of cutting-edge bioscience research and entrepreneurship since its inception. Till date, C-CAMP has supported over 90 innovative Life Science Start-ups, helping them with funding, mentorship, incubation etc.

Exciting Signs of Success for Deep Science Start-ups

C-CAMP has seen a fair amount of success. 25 of its start-ups having secured a follow-on funding of over 200 Crores and 7 healthcare/life sciences technologies have been commercialized.

In 2017, the ‘Top Innovator” Award under the Economic Times Start-up Awards was given to two startups incubated at C-CAMP. The award was a tie between Bugworks Research and Pandorum Technologies, both of which are presently incubated at C-CAMP. This is the first time the award was given to startups from the biotech field.

Bugworks is a drug discovery company working in the area of Anti-microbial resistance and are developing novel antibiotics that counter the threat of resistant pathogens. Virtually all bacterial infections are becoming resistant to antibiotics, posing a fast-growing public health threat worldwide, leading to increased mortality & morbidity. Using systems biology, structural biology &medicinal chemistry, a stealth strategy has been developed to avoid efflux liability & a potentiation strategy has been designed that enables the entry of antibiotics into Gram-negative pathogens. Bugworks is the only company in Asia, recently selected under CARB-X programme from DARPA and Wellcome trust for nearly 7M USD grant.

Pandorum is a biomaterials company that is working to develop 3D printed human tissues for medical research and therapeutics. Recently, they have been successful in creating artificial liver tissue. This artificial 3D liver tissue performs same functions as the human liver. Pandora has also started developing mini-organs (organoids) & bio-engineered cornea. They have received follow-on funding from Flipkart founders, Binny Bansal and Sachin Bansal.

So, is the time right?

Such success stories in biotech were not heard of a few years back. There weren’t many scientists building their entrepreneurial ideas and taking them to the next level. The fear of failure was still there.

With significant improvement in the entrepreneurship support system, many of these things have changed. The credit for this change in mindset goes to support from different stakeholders of the ecosystem like the government, academia, industry etc. These stakeholders have shown strong desire to promote deep-science led life science entrepreneurship. There is an improved understanding at each place on how to support early-stage risky ideas and take them towards application(s). Together, the life science innovation ecosystem is taking a fantastic shape in India.Though more to be done, there is a definite hunger to support good and disruptive ideas. There can’t be a better time to make best of this supportive ecosystem and attempt to build a deep-science based enterprise that one is passionate about.

In 2013, the newly instated central government launched the ‘StartUp India, StandUp India’ initiative with the ‘Make in India’ and ‘Digital India’ initiatives taking shape on the sidelines. This was not a mere coincidence, rather a well thought through social and economic strategy. Soon, public funding, strategic policies & directives, physical & digital infrastructure and private investment mandates were rolled out to support the initiative. Entrepreneurship became a commonly discussed concept not just in the corridors of power or business clusters; rather it percolated right through the B-schools down to K12 schools. What followed over the next four years saw India's emergence as the third largest startup ecosystem in the world.

This growth story, however, did not trickle down to the rural India. Even today, the rural population lacks access to key amenities like basic healthcare, clean water, education, a market for their produce and equal economic opportunities.

StartUps as vehicles of change

70% of India’s population live in the villages. They also make up 40% of the worlds under-served population. India cannot move forward without their inclusion.

StartUps can act as a vehicle of change by bringing better health, improved access to energy, better agricultural technologies, clean water and several such benefits to the rural India. A symbiotic equilibrium can exist where the urban and rural markets can interchangeably exist as producers or consumers at different time points.

Some startups have already started seeing the opportunity in these markets and are doing their bit to bring about a change. Let’s look at some of them:

Agriculture: The existing produce needs bigger markets to sell in and better logistics for storage & transport to minimise wastage. On the other hand, practices like drip irrigation, soil testing, weather forecasting for cultivation/harvest, access to sophisticated farm tools etc can optimise productivity.

• CropIn’s technology uses data from the grassroots like soil content, annual rainfall, cropping pattern & location of the farm to enable solutions that prevents damage in case of a calamity. It also advices on crop cultivation based on soil type etc. In the process it gathers data to further fine tune its algorithms
• Skylark drones and Indrone Solutions employ drones for crop surveying, spraying, monitoring and photography in a bid to make farming more productive and profitable.

Renewable Energy: Even today, much unlike our cities, electricity and fuel remain inaccessible or unaffordable in villages. Clean green sources of energy like wind, solar, geothermal and sometimes natural sources of water are ample in these parts and can be utilised for meeting energy needs, not only in villages but globally.

• Mera Gaon Power builds, owns and operates micro grids serving off-grid villages with high quality, dependable lighting and mobile phone charging services using solar energy. Their innovative model can deliver service in a typical hamlet with a setup cost of as little as $1,000.This is made possible due to its low cost design making it ideal for the rural setting.
• Husk Power Systems: This startup uses a biomass gasifier to generate electricity thus saving 18,000 litres of diesel and 42,000 litres of kerosene every year. Each of the company’s plant is currently serving over 400 rural households in Bihar. This also helps in improving the health conditions in rural communities by reducing indoor air pollution.

Healthcare: Access to primary healthcare and distribution of basic health services remain a challenge in villages due to lack of infrastructure, expertise and intent. With increasing investments in digital infrastructure, medical services and specialist consultations are becoming achievable. At the same time, healthcare providers, with their robust cost-efficient platforms, are not only providing care but are also gathering valuable health-related data.

• iKure follows an innovative impact model that is centered around providing sustainable livelihood to healthcare workers on one hand and employing technology on the other by remotely connecting doctors with patients. Many other enterprises are also employing technology to override the absence of trained healthcare professionals in the villages
• Sigtuple’s artificial intelligence based platforms analyse dense data sets to enable remote diagnosis of blood smears, chest x-rays, urine microscopy, semen, fundus & OCT scans in areas where specialists are not available

Water: Lack of clean drinking water fuels repeated cycles of disease and morbidities in rural settings. Portable & easy-to-use options are much required.

• Think Phi’s product ‘Ulta Chattha’ collects rainwater and filters it to make it drinkable. At the same time it harnesses 15KW of solar energy per unit. Although, the installations are thus far confined to the urban areas, it will find immense use in the villages

• Driptech India Pvt. Ltd.: Provides gravity drip irrigation technology to marginalised farmers in a cost-efficient manner

Skills & Education: Poor infrastructure with uninterested, un-incentivised and overworked teachers has led to a breakdown in this sector, especially in resource-poor settings. Lack of educated or inadequately skilled manpower is adding to the under-employed or unemployed pool of youth. Digital classrooms to bridge this gap and bringing employment opportunities to the villages are the need of the hour. Startups like Meghshala are working on empowering village teachers whereas enterprises like Hella are delivering automobile training to village youth and enabling them to startup on their own.

Harnessing local resources & expertise: The hinterlands have much to offer in terms of natural beauty, local traditions and crafts, and may also offer insights into harmonious co-existence with nature. Many startups are addressing this through innovative models in rural tourism, organic farming, etc.

While these startups are early movers in sensing the needs of the rural markets, there is still room and a huge need for many other startups.When positioned correctly, they can be perfect conduits of socio-economic change as they harness the innate essence of the villages, enable access to amenities and at the same time enable their participation on a global scale.

It is well known that several disruptive innovations come from areas that are dense in institutes doing good academic research – think, the California Bay area and the Boston area in the US, the London area in the UK, the Tel Aviv area in Israel, etc. Many articles and books have been written about why this happens. There are also theories on how more innovation happens in large cities than in smaller ones and how recently crowded cities are becoming difficult places to innovate. For every idea proposed on why some places create more innovations than others, there are a number of examples that contradict them. Given these large number of contradictory ideas and thoughts, and the well known cultural aspects that are important for innovation, how does one create an ecosystem that facilitates and nurtures the process of innovation? I don't think there are any easy answers to these questions or even a correct answer.

In the Indian scenario, the first challenge is cultural. It is well known that the best innovations come from path-breaking discoveries made in academic labs that do very good basic research. Today, world over (including in India) this has become a problem. There is a constant thrust to convert scientists who are good in basic science into translational-scientists. Almost every scientist in the biological sciences talks about curing cancer, neurodegenerative diseases or whatever is the glamorous flavour of the times. So, the first step for me would be to ensure that the best of the lot in basic sciences are supported enough to follow their most innovative ideas. The results they produce might provide unexpected discoveries that can become the basis of disruptive innovations. The ecosystem hence should have the leadership that recognises the importance of good basic science and supports it.

The way science is being done is changing very quickly – most questions that people are asking today come from the ‘intersection of ideas’ (read Medici Effect, by Frans Johansson), and the ‘intersection of disciplines’. The amount of information and knowledge that is available in any area has grown immensely. Hence, gaining in-depth expertise in any area requires years of study, research and work. This creates a contradiction of sorts – if it takes years to gain expertise and this expertise cannot create innovation on its own, then, how does innovation happen? It happens when people with different expertise and ideas work with each other It happens when people with different expertise and ideas work with each other. It happens when ideas collide with each other – it is impossible to know in advance, which ideas will collide to create something disruptive? What the ecosystem needs to do hence, is to create enough opportunities for people with different ideas to collide. The best thing the ecosystem can do to increase the probability of success is to increase the number of collisions. This tends to happen naturally and most often in informal settings. More open discussion spaces, coffee shops, open-laboratories, shared equipment and mixing of academia & industry practitioners, should be feasible in the ecosystem to increase the occurrence and variety of collisions.

Today, technology has become complex. Life-sciences innovation has its quirks like any other area. A lot of work in biology and medicine today, depends on the ability to use state of the art technology, which is evolving and changing at a fast rate. The cost of sequencing, for example, is decreasing very quickly (Flatley’s law). Availability and accessibility to technologies like NextGen sequencing help science to be state of the art, as well as better. These technologies, are expensive, have a short lifespan and require significant expertise to use. Which means, we require not just cutting-edge equipment, but also expert manpower. An ecosystem that provides easy access to state of the art technologies along with expertise in using it, is essential for promoting good science-entrepreneurship.

Most starting science-entrepreneurs are good at their science and technology skills but lacking in other skills that are often crucial for success. These enterprises need help in making business plans, getting connected to the right mentors, running the business – help with Human Resources and the many other things that go into creating a successful and marketable product. Often, the entrepreneurs run around and spend a lot of time to acquire and learn these skills. An ecosystem where there is a constant support for many of such soft needs will relieve more time of the inventor/developer to focus on the product. Interestingly, this often happens over a period of time in most incubation facilities, where there are incubatees are at different stages. They begin to learn from each other. So, an ecosystem that can support start-ups at different stages is critical.

Incidentally, the best places where such ecosystems can be created are close to large academic centres. In the Indian context, the leadership of the academic entity plays a key role. A supportive leadership that also encourages its faculty, students and other scientists to engage in entrepreneurial activity goes a long way in greasing the wheels. This also enables creation of new science-entrepreneurship and encourages these minds to think of ways to convert their discoveries into innovations that can translate into useful products and solutions.

I have not addressed the need for funding – the presence of small funding that will allow discoveries to be converted into innovations, is also a key element. These seed funds can go a long way to test several proof-of-concept ideas quickly in an enabling environment. This can prove to be a great bonus in an ecosystem aiming to accelerate science entrepreneurship.

Finally, as Peter Drucker famously said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. While much of the above can be easily created, the most difficult is to create an ecosystem that is culturally supportive of innovative science- entrepreneurship and celebrates failures as much as successes of the enterprises that get seeded.

In its purest form, science entrepreneurship is the process of taking fruits of science from bench to bedside. As much as science entrepreneurs are being celebrated now, for an academic scientist the entrepreneurial journey can be understandably daunting. My focus in this article will be to discuss what I think are the indispensable elements for an academician to practice effective science entrepreneurship.

Globally, a large number of scientists are keen to explore the translational possibilities of their science, but an only small percent of them turn entrepreneurs, and unfortunately, fewer of them succeed. Ironically, some science-entrepreneurs experience a string of successes and become serial science entrepreneurs. So, is there a modus operandi or a blueprint for efficacious science-entrepreneurship?

Being a science entrepreneur for over a decade and working alongside few of the most prolific academic entrepreneurs, I have had a chance to observe and learn some invaluable lessons. And, as I see it, apart from being technically sound and doing good research, one needs to possess a blend of skills to be successful. Some core skills needed are- nimbleness in taking decisions, good management, communication and fundraising skills. Nevertheless, these traits can be learned and acquired.

Alongside the core skills, entrepreneurs are also often driven by unparalleled personal commitment, willingness to take risks and a willingness to subjecting one’s ideas to meticulous challenges even if it threatens the status quo.Over the years of my own entrepreneurial journey, I have developed a four-constants rule for succeeding at startups.These constants, I believe, are generic for all successful translational undertakings.

The foremost of them all is having a great idea - What makes an idea great is a subjective consideration. The basis of judgment here shouldn't merely be the intricacy or intelligence in the science but which problem is being addressed. If a substantial unmet need can be solved, even by a simplistic approach, an idea can be considered as potent. Science-entrepreneurs measure a technology by how transformative it is rather than its intelligence or complexity! An incremental development of an already existing technology often does not make an impact and is therefore not a rewarding option. To achieve effectual translational science the focus should be on developing disruptive technologies.

Additionally, a great technology can be a one-off product or could be a platform technology. Although, one-off products can provide laser-precision solution to a problem, for a venture having a platform technology is a lucrative option. Considering that biotech ventures often need to pivot their strategies and goals when the initial premise doesn’t work, having the flexibility to tweak the technology in an on-demand manner is always advantageous.

Next in the order is the protection of intellectual property (IP) - While surviving in ‘publish or perish’ scenario, it is imperative to protect IP rights without creating a prior-art. In fact, protecting an idea by filing a patent is an uncommon notion in the scientific community because the priority is to publish, but for a start-up, IP is money! Academic scientists are not formally trained to write patent applications, but this one attribute is propitious for a science-entrepreneur to possess. Although patent lawyers and firms can help in this process, an active involvement of the inventor can escalate the quality of a patent.

Fundamentally, a patent should be broad and blocking. A broad patent is the one that covers all the possible modifications of your technology that can be claimed. This gives room for the company to tweak its technology for extended applications. A blocking patent is the one that prevents anyone from practicing a similar technology. However, the ensuing question here would be, are all ideas worth protecting? Given that, patent filing/maintaining is an expensive process, an inventor should be the strongest critic of her/his work to see all the possible loopholes in the technology, to decide whether the idea is worth the time and money. An extensive prior-art search and due-diligence can help in this process.

Then comes, having it published in a top-tier journal - Well, to be fair, the impact of research should be judged only on the quality of the science in itself, and not on where it is published. However, publication in a prime journal undoubtedly has its own merits. These so-called top journals have a rigorous peer review process which imparts credibility to the science behind the technology. They are viewed by scientists across different fields and are covered by media, which provides visibility to the technology. Such publications are also a measurement of success in academics for the reason that they raise the bar for the quality of work and efforts. This credibility and visibility also help attract potential investors. However, not all the studies published in prominent journals are worth pursuing. Therefore, one needs to develop the sense to diagnose the potential of the technology in its embryonic stage.

And finally, having a great team - This, in fact, is the most critical factor amongst all. Having an incredible group of people who share your vision and passion for the technology can make all the difference. Whether an entrepreneurial endeavour will soar to success or be an absolute failure depends on the team dynamics, and this is where management skills come in the picture. An inventor should be able to work with people who complement her/his expertise and should be willing to give up equity & credit if required, which can sometimes be emotionally demanding.

Success in translational science is not an accident. Likewise, failure is not an accident, either. Right from the beginning, the more carefully you pick the problem, plan and pay attention to minute details during the entire course of this odyssey, the faster you take control over success.

So, to address the question, is there a secret recipe here? The answer most certainly is no! All the logistics behind undertaking a science entrepreneurial adventure can be learned and improvised. Nonetheless, it is a defiantly complex journey which needs tremendous courage and emotional commitment but let me tell you, in the end, it is unquestionably worth it.

Ever felt frustrated about a paywall stopping you from downloading a paper or disadvantaged because you were expected to pay a hefty amount to publish your work in a journal of repute. To curb this unnecessary expenditure and to make research more accessible, the DBT and DST launched an open access policy that mandates researchers, to submit their research papers in government repositories a maximum of six months after publication. The ICAR and CSIR too have similar expectations from their researchers. However, despite the clear directive, Indian researchers have deposited an abysmally low number of papers in these repositories.

Why has the acceptance been so low? Why are Indian researchers letting this opportunity of making Indian research open and accessible pass by? IndiaBioscience spoke to Sridhar Gutam, convener of Open Access India to find answers to these questions:

Let us begin with the benefits of adopting open access publishing.

Two clear benefits are– it cuts down the overall costs of publishing a paper and more importantly it makes research fully accessible for anyone interested in it.

I would like to emphasise here that there is a difference between available and accessible. Even if someone is able to download a research paper, it is possible that the data is available in a form that may not be truly accessible. Take for example a spreadsheet in a PDF- if you want to work further with it, you have to first type the entire thing on your computer and then begin the work or if you know computer programming, you have to write a script to scrape the data. In open access repositories, data is often available in .csv or other open formats and is much easier to work with.

I can give you another example from a study we did. We found that during 2008–2010, 1833 papers were published from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI). All of these papers were available to subscribers of the Consortium for e-Resources in Agriculture (CeRA). However, public access to this e-resource is meagre. As a result the research was available but not accessible.

Why have Indian scientists been slow in embracing the open access repositories, despite a clear directive from government funding agencies?

The first reason I would say is ignorance about the usefulness of such repositories. I have often been asked, “how would I benefit from uploading my work in such a repository”? Once people start using these repositories actively they are bound to generate viewership for papers listed on them. Since access is completely free of cost, with time, more and more people will start gravitating towards it, increasing viewerships further. The number of citations and the possibility of people collaborating increases too as nobody is stopped from accessing a paper.

The other problem is with the way research is assessed in our country. Even today, the application forms that research assessment committees will have you fill have questions like– what is the impact factor of the journal you have published your work in or what is the rating of the journal? They should instead be asking how much of your work is available in open access repositories? How well has it been cited and accessed by people across the globe? It is the impact of research and not the impact factor, that should be assessed. The 2014 Dora Declaration provides guidelines on good practices in research assessment. Though DBT and Wellcome Trust-DBT India Alliance are signatories on the DORA declaration, in India, we are yet to fully embrace its guidelines.

Scholarly societies too fall into the trap of impact factors and viewerships generated by big publishing houses. For example, few of the societies hosted in ICAR (I don’t want to name them) signed up to be hosted by Springer. Most likely, this tie-up was fuelled by a desire for higher viewership. The question is why didn’t they choose to be available on ICAR e-publication platform instead? That would have assured high viewership too. Publishing in a high Impact factor journal or with a well known publisher is not the only way of ensuring viewership for your work.

It is in such cases that we are trying to make a difference through our advocacy work. Our attempt is to make researchers and scholarly societies aware about open access policies that can lead to wider dissemination and greater impact of the published work.

There’s also the issue of copyrights. After publication, a research paper’s copyright is transferred from the authors to the publishers. Would it be legal to put such papers in open access repositories?

The simple and legally viable solution to this problem is the ‘author’s addendum’. While submitting their research papers authors can choose to include this addendum which allows them to retain rights to submit their work in open access repositories. Most journals now recognise and accept this addendum.

The other option is to archive the pre-prints– the first draft of the manuscript which a researcher submits to a journal. Again, most journals are open to accepting work that has been archived in a pre-print server. Pre-prints can be submitted to open access repositories. To this end, we (Open Access India) have started AgriXiv- a pre-print archive for agriculture research. It is hosted by Centre for Open Science using the Open Science Framework. However, even for AgriXiv the acceptance has been very low.

I also would like to add that nowadays several questionable publishers are marketing themselves as open access publishers. They usually charge a good amount of processing fee and are willing to publish whatever you submit without peer review. In such a scenario, two resources that can aid researchers in making an informed decision about whether a journal is authentic or not are– Think Check Submit and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

What other activities is Open Access India involved in?

Open Access India started as an online advocacy group on Facebook in 2011. We have grown quite a bit since then in scale and reach. Our members include scientists, students and even librarians. Apart from online advocacy we now conduct webinars, workshops and meetings to make researchers aware of the usefulness of open access. We also run a student ambassador programme, wherein we select students, young researchers and librarians from across India, train them about open access and then help them disseminate the knowledge further.

We work in close collaboration with Open Access Nepal, Open Access Bangladesh and Open Access Pakistan. In fact, we are now hoping to start an open access forum for all SAARC countries to help scientists (especially, early career researchers) in the sub-continent share their work openly and legally.

Apart from the sub-continent, how is the acceptance for open access in the rest of the world?

There’s a definite shift happening towards open access publishing. The OA2020 Initiative, which has been accepted by more than 560 institutions worldwide, is working towards a global transition from current publishing models to an open access system. The Open Access India has also signed up for the initiative. Publishers too have begun tweaking their system to fit in the changing environment. Sherpa Romeo - an online resource that analyses publisher copyright policies– says 80% publishers on its list now allow archiving work in some or the other format. Many communities are coming forward to discuss, practice, and share success stories of the Open Access movements happening around the world.

Whether you are studying, teaching or doing science, talking about it in plain English seems to be a daunting, and universal challenge. Wouldn’t you agree? Sooner or later, a lot of us succumb to ‘expert speak’, where the description of your research gets peppered with technical and field-specific jargon. It’s easy to talk to others in the same field (or taking the same class); but talk to anyone other than that, and you are likely to get a glazed look and intense struggle to not ‘look bored’. If you are someone passionate about doing science, how do you inspire the same passion and enthusiasm for science in your audience? Try out your communication skills and apply to EURAXESS Science Slam India 2017 — entries to the competition can be submitted till October 10th.

Now in its fifth year, the EURAXESS Science Slam India aims to encourage trainees to talk about their research to a non-expert audience; and to do so in a fun and entertaining way. This year, the scope of entries is widened to include Masters’ students, in addition to PhD students and Postdocs in years past. Trainees from all fields including Social Sciences and Humanities, Life Sciences and Engineering are eligible to apply.

Damanbha Lyngdoh, who was crowned the Science Slammer in 2016, is a PhD student in Parasitology at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong. He also teaches in the Zoology Department at St. Anthony’s College. “Fieldwork for my Dissertation research takes me to all states in the North-East. There is incredible cultural diversity in this part of the country. There are 26 major tribes in Arunachal Pradesh alone, 23 in Nagaland, and so on.. I need to be able to communicate with them in ways that are sensitive to their customs. Sometimes people are not literate; which presents an added challenge. Considering all this, honing my abilities in communicating science is a top priority; as much as doing (and teaching) science is. And I had been looking for channels that would help me do just that. Browsing through YouTube on one occasion, I came upon slam competition entries. In German! So I looked around to see if there was something like that in India too…and sure enough…”

“Most of the audience in Bangalore at the communication training workshop were from science background. And yet my attempt to communicate my work didn’t go as well as it could have been. I realised that you can't assume that people are from science background, so they know ‘your science’. Every opportunity to communicate your science to a new audience is a new challenge. You need to tailor your message accordingly”, said Lyngdoh.

Other finalists echoed the value of taking the audience-centric approach to communicating science. Ananth Krishna, also one of the finalists, shared how while planning and conducting research, the focus is on the scientist doing the study — what you want to test/what are you looking to find, etc. But when presenting the same research to other people, it is the audience that matters. “It is not easy to bring about this shift in your own mindset. Mostly, we discuss with people in similar field/area of interest, which only fosters the use of technical jargon. That’s why sharing your research with a diverse audience can be immensely powerful.”

Arnab Bhattacharya (faculty from TIFR Bombay), who conducts the science communication training of finalists, strongly believes it is imperative to interact with other fields, whether you are studying science, teaching it or practicing it.

Interaction with people from different fields, that is one of the perks of participating in the science communication training ground called Science Slam. More details on this year’s competition can be found at EURAXESS Science Slam India website. Go on…slam your way to Europe.

In the last decade, as the number of scientific papers coming out of Indian labs has soared, so has the number of papers being retracted. We investigated data from retractiondatabase.org to look at recent trends in India and found a 22-fold rise in retractions from 2006 to 2016.

retractiondatabase.org is an online database of retracted papers from around the globe, being maintained by Retraction Watch- a website dedicated to tracking retractions. Starting from 1992 to 2017, the database lists 545 retracted papers from India. The database itself is a work in progress, so more papers will be added in due course of time.

The trend

The overall trend is of a clear rise in the number of retracted papers. While only 5 papers were retracted in 2006, in 2016 this number rose to 109. In 2017, 55 papers have been retracted so far. As the year ends this number may rise. Previous studies too (such as here and here) have reported a rising trend.

The reasons

Though retracted papers still form a very small percentage of total published papers, what causes worry are the reasons driving these retractions. In an ideal world retractions would happen when scientists discovered errors in their work or science progressed to newer truths. However, a closer look at the retracted papers shows that scientific misconduct such as plagiarism and/or duplication of work as top reasons for retraction.

545 Indian papers are listed on the retraction database. Of these, more than hundred have been retracted for plagiarising text. Most papers had 3-4 reasons for retraction. The chart below shows the reasons that were responsible for retraction of at least 15 papers.

The subjects

The retracted papers come from all branches of science. 310 were from the biological sciences, which included cell and molecular biology, genetics, neuroscience, microbiology etc. It was followed by medicine(269), physical sciences(181) and environmental sciences(40) respectively.

The geography

Of all the papers listed in the database approximately 15 percent had international collaborators, with US being the top collaborator. Among other papers, several had collaborators from different parts of the country. Highest number of authors came from Tamil Nadu, followed by Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and New Delhi.

The questions

So, why are retractions on a rise? What makes people plagiarise, in the first place? Is it ignorance, is it apathy for ethics, is it the pressure to publish or is it the misplaced confidence that 'I can get away with it'? The reasons vary from a case to case basis. Clearly, there is an immediate need for the scientific community to engage with ethics in science in a more meaningful way. The question is, will they rise up to the occasion?

Marking the anniversary of ‘Quit India movement’, this was a call for superstitious and unscientific thinking to ‘Quit India’. Organised by Breakthrough Science Society (a non-profit organisation based out of Kolkata with chapters in 14 states), ‘march for science’ across India, called for (1) increased budgetary support for research and science education, (2) a stand against obscurantism, and (3) engaging the public. Carrying banners like ‘Don’t bury your conscience under con science’, and ‘Always ask for evidence,’ thousands of science supporters marched in cities across the country on August 9. Marches in different cities witnessed wide involvement on social media, and were covered by leading dailies throughout.

As much real was the excitement among march supporters and organisers, the march was not without its critics. Some expressed their disagreement on the march protesting budget cuts to science, citing 17% increase in DST’s budget and 12% increase to DBT in the latest budget. An argument could be made that Indian government, regardless of which political party is in power, has largely been supportive of science, or at the very least, not against it. But it is also true that lines between mythology and history are increasingly getting blurred, with leading public officials making statements for “good old days of Indian science”, claiming that everything from transplantation and aeroplanes were invented in India, and passed on to the rest of the world; all the while the national expenditure on science has consistently been less than 1% of GDP.

In the interest of a balanced discussion, one has to wonder — matching national spending on science on par with other countries — will that be the answer to India’s science woes? What does it even take to increase GDP spending on science? And is the scientific community in the country prepared to absorb the hike to 3% proposed during the march? On the other hand, must we wait for more money to be made available for “achhe din” for science in India? “Even within the current funding, we can have a discussion about reprioritisation, about efficiency in the disbursal of funds, about involving younger scientists in the decision about how money is spent, etc. There is a lot we can ask for, not just more funds,” says Mukund Thattai from NCBS Bangalore.

In part, the march in cities across India was meant “to complement and supplement global effort” we witnessed on Earth Day earlier in the year, with 600 marches across the world galvanised by anti-science stance of the new administration in the White House. The scene in India is not quite along the same lines as it is in US: while denial of climate change was emboldened in the US since the last presidential elections, India could pride itself on having a National Action Plan on Climate Change. But before we do that, consider some additional facts: India’s largest R&D organisation, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), has recently declared ‘financial emergency’. Two years ago, CSIR was instructed to start financing itself. More recently, director-general Girish Sahni asked each CSIR lab to compile its own list of technologies that can be marketed/licensed to industry in order to raise funds. Interestingly, CSIR banned participation of its scientists in the August 9 march. For another [reason], more and more scientists are concerned over increased pseudoscience rhetoric around, a very recent example being an article in a leading daily that claimed eating during lunar eclipse is harmful (there is no evidence to support this claim).

Very noticeably , all science academies in the country sat out the march. Why that was, who can say… But as IndiaBioscience reached out to people for comments, many either did not respond or did so only on the condition of anonymity. This concern for what might befall them, was common among people who marched and those who didn’t. “These worries are largely over-blown. There is no cause for this level of paranoia. It is one thing to not march because you disagree with some specifics of the goals of the march, but to not participate for the worry of being seen as ‘anti-national’ or ‘anti-government,’ there is no need for that”, remarks Thattai.

Regardless of whether people joined in the marches or not, the overall cause of science does enjoy broad support in India, though this may have been the first time that the support was evident in the form of public marches. So, what’s next? A loud and clear message since is that the marches ought to be the first of a continuum of steps for the scientific community to engage the public. Organisers from science march Allahabad are developing plans for broad engagement with the public, addressing among other things, widely held superstitious beliefs; a sentiment echoed also by organisers at Wardha (Maharashtra).

If there is a single phrase that characterises our attitude towards environment conservation and urban development, it would no doubt be “ubiquitous contradictions”. In theory, most people would be for increasing forest cover, until it comes to fulfilling basic needs for the world’s teeming population. Then the same individuals would clamour for more urban development and adapting more land for agriculture. We are for maintaining biodiversity, so we designate “protected land”; until it comes to the people who call these protected lands their home, and have done so for millennia. Where do they factor in conservation strategies? Or do they?

What are we aiming to conserve? More importantly, who is “we”?

Google “forest definition”, and the top hit (Wikipedia) defines it as “a large area dominated by trees”. Browse through the website of a leading global non-profit, WWF, and you find, on every one of their pages about forests, pictures of dense green canopies. “Why are forests important for us?” Many reasons of course, but the top one being “for absorbing harmful greenhouse gasses that produce climate change”. Not inaccurate, but definitely incomplete. This is an extremely one-dimensional definition of forests and their value to humans.

Why should we care how exactly forest is defined, and whether or not the definition is precise? Definition is important as it directly impacts policy, societal value systems, and therefore ultimately what is valued for conservation.

Equally critical to what it is that’s being targeted for conservation is also who are the people who have a say in that. Conservationists, NGOs, state authorities — essentially urbanites, make the rules. And they are implemented in a top-down manner, sidelining the local communities, who historically, have not been part of the decision-making process.

Depending on which side of the aisle you are on — whether you see the indigenous communities as partners in conservation or roadblocks in the way of that — we can all agree that whichever way you slice it, it comes down to economics. Indigenous groups living around protected areas have, as a rule, been among the economically weaker segments of society. A recent study documented community management in Indonesian forests, and found that “community forest management fails when the economic returns of converting forest to oil palm exceed those of intact forest.” Let’s face it, valuing biodiversity is an unaffordable ‘leisure’ when it is hard to make ends meet.

Environment conservation conflict: indigenous communities vs urbanites

In order to preserve the forests and its wildlife, historically the local communities are the very people who have borne the brunt of conservation. For them, this has meant a slew of restrictions in the best case scenario, to loss of their homes and/or livelihood. If you are “for” conservation of nature, does that automatically make you “against” human rights of the indigenous communities who live in and around the protected areas?

When it comes to forests, joint ownership is not the trend. In fact, this strategy of conservation is often ignored, perhaps because it is a largely contested issue.

For all legal purposes, forests are “government property”. But when deciding on how to best balance their use and conservation, shouldn’t the people living there be taken into consideration? How does India fare in this respect? Not very well actually.

In March of this year, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) declared that in areas designated as critical tiger habitats, “no rights shall be conferred to traditional forest dwellers”, summarily dismissing their rights to forest land and forest produce, granted under the Forest Rights Act (2006). This law is also intended to democratise the conservation process, to make the local communities a part of the process of conservation all the while ensuring their livelihoods. While the legality of NTCA’s order is an open question, it certainly doesn’t bode well for creating space in national policy for joint ownership for all stakeholders.

Nitin Rai, faculty at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) Bangalore, has worked in Biligiri Rangaswamy Temple (BRT) hills of Karnataka for the last twenty years. He has written extensively about increasing the involvement of local communities in conservation, particularly the indigenous community called the Soligas, who have called the BRT hills their home for centuries. “A call to “conserve x% of land” (presently ‘x’ is just shy of 5% of land in India, though there are calls to increase this number to 10%) is, in essence, also saying “no people in this 5% land”, so wildlife can increase. And more importantly, “do whatever you want with the remaining land”, essentially urban development at whatever cost. Such a policy allows for ‘business as usual’ — mining, greenhouse gas emission, etc. — current and future source of problems facing humanity, are all green-lighted in a larger land area. It ignores the question of what effects these problems might have on the fate of land that is earmarked for conservation”, says Rai.

Environment management conflict: ‘conserving for tomorrow’ vs ‘harvesting for profit today’

If we take a look at India’s fisheries industry as an example, modification or upscaling of fishing practices over the years in response to increased demand, has had, and continues to be deleterious for marine stocks. As demands have grown, industry practices were upscaled, seemingly with a single objective — to increase yield.

Along similar lines as conservationists calling for x% of land to be protected, fishing industry, which is state-controlled in India, calls for fishing ban for set number of days. In Tamil Nadu for instance, the ban is currently for 45 days. Again, similar to the logic of conservation on designated areas, the fishing ban means unchecked fishing the remaining 320 days of the year. Do we know, or rather shouldn’t we know, if this ban makes any difference for the better?

Similar to the trends we see in forest management, in fisheries management too, rules and regulations are designed by government agencies, with no input from the fishing communities who are directly impacted by these policies. Few years ago, Dakshin Foundation, Bangalore, along with College of Fisheries, Mangalore, organised a forum for management of conflicts in fisheries. This 3-day workshop included representatives from regulatory authorities, fisheries scientists as well as members of various fishing communities in Karnataka. The foundation’s report mentions “the fishing community members at the workshop look toward a change in this approach of state-controlled decision-making…” and “expressed their interest to participate in decision-making related to enforcement, issuing boat licenses, subsidies and managing access to fishing grounds.”

What comes out loud and clear through avenues such as these for instance, is that there is urgent need, and immense scope, for joint ownership in the management and conservation of environmental resources. Both (management and conservation) are extremely nuanced, and it would be a folly of the gravest kind to draw up our plans in stark black and white. So long as the logic behind conservation efforts is binary, we are not going to be able to balance conservation with our need for resources. We have to realise the criteria for defining value in conservation are not static; that conservation strategies and objectives will have to adapt to effects from climate change, and from growing needs of world population.

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Credits for inline images:

Left panel: Everglades (By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters - Everglades Headwaters Refuge Uploaded by Dolovis, Public Domain https://commons.wikimedia.org/...)

Right panel: Forest canopy in the Nilgiris (By L. Shyamal (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)

On 5th June the usually beige lobby of our apartment complex looked green, with over fifty small tulsi plants neatly stacked in rows. The receptionist urged us to take one home to mark World Environment Day.

We brought a plant back to our very non-green home, and my six-year old insisted we pot it right then. Then, he asked me why they were giving away plants. I gave him the whole spiel about saving the environment to which he simply said that it looked very pretty and that we should pot some more plants.

“Once someone plants, they’ll plant for life,” I remembered Malali Gowda saying. Gowda is one of the founders of the Biodiversity Conservation and Research Trust, Anuganalu village, Karnataka, and a professor at the Transdisciplinary University (TDU), Bangalore.

“We had a forest, we lost it,” he had said, talking about his village Anuganalu, in Hassan district of Karnataka at the foot of the Western Ghats. Because of the indiscriminate cutting down of trees, the hills near his village became barren. These hills are important as the trees there help seed clouds and act as a gateway for the monsoons from the Western Ghats to move eastward in that region. Deciding he had to do something about it, he motivated his family, friends, and other villagers to start planting fast-growing trees on the rocky, barren lands around his village. This was in 2000. Within 5 years, their efforts paid off and the brown land was green with grass and small trees. Another result of the greening was that the groundwater level increased.

Community-led activities like these are labelled as citizen science. In other words, non-scientists participating in and furthering scientific endeavours by collecting and analysing data.

Although it has attracted great attention in the last few years, most scientists in recorded history, until perhaps the early 20^th century, were ordinary citizens, who usually had other day jobs and dabbled in science simply out of curiosity. Leonardo da Vinci earned a living as an artist, performing scientific experiments in his spare time. Asking a network of people to record their observations of the natural world and collecting specimens was a common method that early naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus used to understand the world around them.

At home, in India, wildlife conservation with the participation of people has been going on for more than 25 years, according to Krithi Karanth, a conservation biologist and executive director at the Center for Wildlife Studies, Bangalore. Her father, eminent conservation biologist Ullas Karanth, started citizen science programs in Karnataka with just a few hundred people, she said. Now, these initiatives have spread to various parts of the country with several thousand citizen scientists volunteering in the last two decades.

Participants from different walks of life have come together to do their bit in protecting wildlife. They have walked the jungles to report animal sightings, conducted bird surveys, butterfly surveys, monitored camera traps, and surveyed hundreds of villagers to understand the effect of human-wildlife conflict. Such massive projects if done alone would take years, but with the help of volunteers it can be done in a couple of months, she added.

Because of the surveys on human-wildlife conflict, the results of which were shared with the government, Krithi developed a project that helped thousands of families in Bandipur and Nagarhole file claims with the government and receive compensation much faster than before. In addition, the study showed that no one preventive measure was useful for minimising loss of crops or livestock. “So, it's science that led to a conservation intervention that is having real-world impact on the lives of thousands of people,” she said.

Another successful example of citizen science is the Seeds for Needs program by Bioversity International that started in 2009 in Ethiopia. Aimed at making farmers resilient to climate change, the program helps volunteer farmers test out different varieties of crops in their own fields and they provide feedback on which varieties have higher yields. Spread across 13 countries globally, the program has 15000 volunteers from India alone, and farmers from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Madhya Pradesh are participating.

A study published last month tried to understand why farmers do this. Motivations vary across the globe, they found, and for Indian farmers, it was the idea of contributing to scientific progress and welfare of all that drove them.

Sometimes there are questions that can be answered perhaps only using citizen science. In India, people believe that the pied cuckoo or the chatak bird, a summer visitor to northern India from Africa, arrives before the rains, yearning for water, and if the bird arrives, the rains can’t be far behind.

Whether this is actually true was answered by a program started almost a decade ago. Called MigrantWatch, birdwatchers from all over the country reported sightings of various migratory birds and uploaded the data onto a website. When the data of first sightings of the pied cuckoo over various locations over several years were collated and analysed along with the dates of the arrival of the monsoons, the answer was clear. The pied cuckoo does indeed arrive before the monsoons although how long before varies based on the location and year.

The MigrantWatch program ran for 8 years starting in 2007, with more than 2000 birdwatchers reporting in. For some, it was simply a continuation of an old hobby, for some watching birds was something new. Be it watching birds, planting trees or watching wildlife, all the volunteers are motivated by the desire to do something beyond their daily life and contribute to the environment in some way.

“I do think that it's fair to say that when people see what difference their participation makes, they become both more regular and committed participants as well as become 'ambassadors' by reaching out to other people and audiences about the project or activity,” said Suhel Quader, a scientist with the Nature Conservation Foundation and an avid proponent of citizen science.

Internationally too, public engagement in science has become an important part of public policy. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has established a center for public engagement. Similarly, the European Commission has listed public engagement as an essential part of responsible research and innovation. Several of India’s environmental problems, be it being prepared to weather climate change or saving our forests and wildlife, can benefit by adopting this participatory approach, as decades of work has shown.

Back in Anuganalu, the barren land is now green, except for one hill that has been left barren, a reminder of what was. Left to itself, the forest would have taken about 50 years to come back, but with the help of people, it took five. As Gowda remarked, “everybody participates, everybody grows.”

For Manzoor Javaid, it started off as a hobby — he maintains a herbal garden at his house in Achabal (Kashmir), that now has more than 150 species of medicinal plants. One of his friends, a faculty at Zoology Department in Boys’ Degree College in Anantnag, invited him to give a talk and share his knowledge of medicinal plants with students and faculty. Out of conversations that followed came an offer from the department: would he help them set up a herbal garden on their campus? He, of course, was more than willing! Similar incidences followed in couple other colleges in the area as well. “I gave them some plants to start a garden, technical expertise as they needed,” says Javaid.

Word spread, ultimately reaching the ear of State Education minister, Naeem Akhtar; who approved funds to set up herbal gardens in schools and teacher training centres in Kashmir. For Manzoor, there was no looking back after that point. He was made incharge of the Coordination Cell of the Herbal Garden Scheme in the State’s Education Department. This scheme is now a flagship program under Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyaan in J&K state.

As of December last year, this scheme expanded to include education institutions in Jammu division as well. Over a span of mere four months, the movement has now gained ground in over 600 educational institutions (including schools, degree colleges, and teacher-training centres).

The working of an individual herbal garden in an educational institution generally requires a curator — one of the teaching staff, who has the main responsibility for upkeep. But setting up and day-to-day maintenance is very much a collaborative effort between teachers and students. There are also volunteers who help coordinate at various levels of organisation (district, province, and so on).

Javaid’s Herbal Garden Cell provides plants, and funds of course, for institutions to set up their own herbal gardens. But they go one step beyond that. They also connect schools and colleges with other sources: the IIIM (Indian Institute of Integrative Medicine) for instance, has many nurseries; as does the State Forest Department. In so doing, his office is promoting collaboration across many government institutions.

Aside from greening of campuses, this movement also serves to promote conservation of local biodiversity. “Many locally found medicinal plants are on the verge of extinction. And for their part, people lack the basic know-how on the wealth of medicinal plants we have around us,” says Javaid. Through participation, students and teachers not only get to know about plants around them but also their value to local communities, in their traditions, as well as their medicinal value.

His vision for the future of this movement, he says, is for “students to have ownership of gardens they help maintain at their institutions. There is a lot of scope for student-led research activities through their participation. After first couple years, we might also be able to commercialise — sell some of the plants from school/college gardens, or we might be able to formulate a product out of the plants — many possible ways that can yield monetary benefit to the students involved.”

Sixteen researchers, eight days, four stories, two instructors; the Shoot for Science workshop that recently concluded was the brainchild of molecular ecologist turned science-photographer, Prasenjeet Yadav. Co-organised by Anand Varma, a National Geographic photographer based in the US, the core focus of the workshop was on science communication. While scientists pursue questions with a passion, few others have an insight into the scientific process. The language scientists use is often technical and the excitement of science gets lost in jargon. Efforts to bridge this gap are of vital importance—they inform a wide audience about the successes and impacts of science, increase scientific literacy and inspire young students. Effective communication requires time and creativity. The first step is to capture the attention of the audience. Few media achieve that first step more successfully than photography.

The aim of this unique workshop, Shoot for Science, was to enable scientists to tell the story of their science to a wide audience using photography. Training scientists for the job was a natural choice—it would be easier to equip a scientist with the tools and know-how of photography; they already have a deep and personal insight into the process of science.

Supported by funding from National Geographic Society and hosted by the National Centre of Biological Sciences, Bangalore, the workshop began with an introduction to the basics of photography. Armed with cameras provided by Nikon, and an array of lighting and miscellaneous accessories, the participants subsequently worked in groups to develop photo stories around research done by scientists at NCBS. Here is the story of the workshop told in a series of photos, interspersed with some of the stunning pictures produced by these newly-minted science photographers.

(Images credited to 'Shoot for Science' were taken behind the scenes. The ones credited to different teams are images taken by the participants during the course of the workshop.)

What's the story?

The first day began with a crash course on camera basics. Technical tricks aside, it was the story that was of central importance. To this end, participants spent the afternoon listening to talks from 4 scientists at NCBS. Their first major exercise was to distill the science and draw out stories that could be told using images. They each proposed possible shot ideas that were refined in the following days. Image credit: Shoot for Science

Learning the ropes

Expert tips to help get the light just right: Anand Varma teaches students the application and importance of lighting techniques and how lighting can be used to highlight a particular scientific process in science photography. Image credit: Shoot for Science

Lessons on lighting

Morning sessions on subsequent days were dedicated to hands-on sessions on lighting and composition. Prasenjeet Yadav helps students understand how the direction and intensity of the light source affect the final image. Image credit: Shoot for Science

Microbes in the spotlight

A simple light source is used to create a compelling shadow of a bacterial colony in a Petri dish containing growth medium on which a leaf pattern has been imprinted. The swirl patterns come from the cooling of medium and glass plate as it solidifies. Do these microbes play a beneficial role in butterfly growth and development? That’s the question being pursued in the Agashe lab. Image credit: Team Agashe

Shedding light on butterfly-microbe interactions

Here, a plain tiger larva feeds on milkweed leaf. The leaf is placed in microbial growth medium to show abundant growth of microbes. This representational image suggests that the larvae feeding on the leaf eats the bacteria too; this may be essential for its growth and development. Image credit: Team Agashe

Formulating frames

Challenged to compose a shot in a cramped space, Sukanya Olkar devised a setup involving mirrors. To clarify whether it would work, she scribbled it down to share with Anand Varma. “I like to plan setups too, mostly in my head because I can’t draw very well. Sukanya came up with an idea and made a good doodle too, an easy and visual way of checking whether a shot is feasible,” said an impressed Varma. Doodle credit: Sukanya Olkar

Taking stock

A lot of importance was given to sharing ideas and getting feedback from colleagues during the workshop. Here, participants review and assess their shots, with inputs from Anand Verma. "I liked the review sessions where each team presented their images, which were discussed at length in terms of composition, technique, and the idea that was being conveyed. Every time new ideas to improve the image used to pop up," said one of the participants, Sarah Iqbal. Image credit: Shoot for Science

Telling the whole story

How do bees keep time? Do factors other than light affect their central clock? In particular, a student from the Brockmann lab asks whether the time of food availability has an effect on the internal clock.
The most critical element of science photography is story. This picture tells it all in a single frame. Image credit: Team Brockmann

The art of storytelling

Kurt Mutchler, senior science photo editor at National Geographic, narrates the stories behind the alluring photo stories he has crafted for the magazine, to a captive audience at Dasheri Auditorium, NCBS. He also shared an editor’s perspective, giving insights into elements that help shape an engaging science story. Image Credit: Shoot for Science

The process of science

A lot of science communication focusses on results and findings. It is as important to talk about the process itself—the tools, methods, experimental design, measurements and analysis that go into building and verifying a hypothesis. Shown here in this image is the set-up for imaging the brain of a living apple maggot fly.

Formerly fans of hawthorn berries, the apple maggot flies evolved over time to like (and infest) apples brought to the US by foreigners. The Olsson lab has new insights into how a crossing of wires in the brains of these flies correlates with a preference for the smell of apples over hawthorne berries. Image Credit: Team Olsson

Screen within a screen

Parijat, one of the participants takes her time composing her picture of a virtual reality set up constructed by the scientists in the Olsson lab. Image credit: Shoot for Science

The apple of its eye

Glued to a tether by its neck, an apple maggot fly zooms around in a virtual meadow filled with its favourite apple trees. The scientists monitor wingbeats as it flies around to understand how the flies visually locate apples in a large meadow. Image credit: Team Olsson

Where the science happens

Pictures taken in a lab give a glimpse of the arena where all the excitement unfolds. Here, the photographer is seen sharing space with a clutter of equipment and furniture to catch the experiments as they happen. Image Credit: Shoot for Science

Scientist at work

Capturing bees at night hours to track down certain chemicals that influence behaviour and analyse whether they have a role in timekeeping. Image Credit: Team Brockmann

Out in the field

Not all science happens within the confines of a lab. Here Yadav helps one of the teams capture termites using studio-like conditions in the field. Image credit: Shoot for Science

Unravelling termite tricks

Using water labelled with green fluorescent dyes, scientists in the Sane lab track termites and study how they modulate the moisture content of the soil, making it better suited for their building needs. Image Credit: Team Sane

Right or wrong?

How much image manipulation is permissible? Is it ok to remove even minor and irrelevant distractions for better image composition or to hone in on the story? Many such contentious questions were raised and tackled in the ethics session. Kurt Mutchler provided an editorial viewpoint—what publications, in particular NatGeo, permitted. Uma Ramakrishnan, a molecular ecologist, was the scientists’ voice. The questions challenged Mutchler in spite of having pondered questions on ethics over a 25-year long career as a science photographer and editor. What emerged from this very relevant and important session was that there may not be right and wrong answers. However, it is vital to encourage open discussion and debate about ethics in order to urge scientists and communicators to be aware, to introspect and to formulate personal and publishing guidelines that they revisit and revise as they go through their careers. Image Credit: Shoot for Science

The photographers

Image Credit: Shoot for Science

Shoot for Science was an intense course. The participants had a steep learning curve to climb. They took the challenge head-on, clocking long hours in the studio brainstorming together and honing their images and collaborating to create that perfect shot. "It was a great learning experience. Starting from how to think of communicating a story to how to use a camera, it was all new to me," said participant Ipsa Jain who had previously only used mobile cameras.

It was heartwarming for the organisers to see how seriously the participants took their assignments and very often, they were pleasantly surprised by their dedication and the quality of the work the teams produced. They hope to sustain this effort and empower a quorum of scientist-photographers in India, who through their images can spread the joy of science, and perhaps inspire aspiring young students to pursue careers in science and science communication.

India's Biodiversity Act is a 'mystery' to most biologists and startup founders, began Malathi Lakshmikumaran, a leading Indian law expert in the life sciences sector. She was addressing a seminar hall overflowing with young bio-preneurs and researchers at C-CAMP Bangalore on February 3, 2017.

Researchers tend to “brush it away under the carpet” thinking they will deal with it later. Unfortunately, there is no later. Lakshmikumaran urged her audience to be “careful” of the act while also acknowledging there aren't any awareness programs to help researchers and entrepreneurs understand the implications of the act.

The Biodiversity Act was laid down in 2002 to ensure conservation and sustainable use of India's rich biodiversity. It lays out guidelines to ensure equitable sharing of benefits arising out of any commercial utilisation of a biological resource. Though the act's objectives are noble and needed to stop bio-piracy, it has become a barrier for many.

Take for instance Section 3 of the act that requires all foreign nationals to obtain an approval from the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) before using any biological resource. If you are a company using a biological resource - plants, microbes, animals or bio-products derived from it— this clause implies that you need to think twice before allowing any foreign investment or participation in your company. Any individual who has a citizenship of another country or is an Non-Resident Indian (NRI) is considered foreigner under the act and is not allowed to either fund or be part of the senior management without prior approval. Foreigners are not allowed to handle biological material, so they can't even do lab work that directly deals with a biological resource.

Usually, scientists look forward to international collaborations. This is in stark contrast with what the government expects from companies stemming out of these research environments.

It is not just the startups who are facing the heat. Even established research organisations feel tied down because of the act. Lakshmikumaran cited the example of Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), a listed company, that has conducted research in collaboration with Department of Biotechnology (DBT) to create modified micro-organisms that feed on oil and can help cleanup oil spills. They now want to patent this technology and commercialise it. However, when they sought out NBA's approval on this, they ran into trouble. Being a publicly listed company, some of IOC's shareholders are foreigners or NRIs. As per the biodiversity act, this makes them a company with foreigners/NRIs in top management, and therefore, ineligible to use any kind of biological resource (microorganisms in this case) for a commercial purpose. The matter is yet be resolved.

If you are an all-Indian company, things are slightly easier for you. While you have free access to any bio-product, you must notify the State Biodiversity Board (SBB) before you plan to commercialise your product. The process of notifying the state board is fairly simple. However, if the board raises an objection, you land yourself in a judicial rigmarole. Lakshmikumaran shared the example of Ruchi Soya, a Madhya Pradesh (MP) based company that buys soybean (a biological resource) from the market and uses it to make soya oil and sell it (commercialisation of a bio-resource). When MP-SBB found out about Ruchi soya oil, they asked them pay royalty for having commercialised a bio-resource. The company owners eventually had to go to National Green Tribunal (NGT) and luckily the NGT ruled in their favour.

In 2016, the NBA came up a new guideline that lists 385 products which are exempted from the Biodiversity Act. Soybean is one of them.

Apart from commercialisation, Indian companies also need to be very cautious in patenting their product. Before filing any patent, international or national, they must notify the NBA. Failing to notify the NBA before a patent is granted can amount to criminal offence.

The reason behind this tussle between research organizations and the NBA stems from a discord: “the way legal people look at science and scientists look at it are very different”, says Lakshmikumaran. She insists that the Act needs to be modified to better suit the needs of researchers as well as those it hopes to protect. However, she doesn’t expect change to happen any time soon. Therefore it is absolutely necessary for everybody in the field to be cognizant of the act.