If your travels bring you to Boston, do take the T – the first subway system in the United States, built in 1897 – to get around town. Get down at the Kendall/MIT station on the Red Line – yes, this is the stop for the Kendall business district and the engineering school of renown, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When you emerge from the subway, you’ll find yourself walking in the area which has earned the title “Most Innovative Square Mile on the Planet.”

Right away, you’ll see tall steel-and-glass buildings on Main Street. These are the labs and offices of tech titans, biotech firms, and pharmaceutical companies – Google, Akamai, Novartis, Microsoft, and Moderna to name a few. Less than half-a-century ago, despite the presence of MIT, and Harvard University, which is just two T-stops away, this same area used to be a depressing stretch of boarded-up factories, fenced-in vacant lots, and parking areas. What changed?

In Where Futures Converge, Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub, Robert Buderi, business and technology writer, tells the story of the movers and shakers, the policy makers and planners, and the places and events that shaped the region’s knowledge economy. He offers a fascinating account of the history of innovation in Kendall Square, which is at the confluence of world class research institutes, academia, and hospitals, all within walking distance of each other.

An ecosystem like this cannot be easily replicated elsewhere but Buderi asks pertinent questions: Can this area continue to maintain its ascendancy as a global hub of innovation? Can this economy do a better job of including minorities in the process of wealth creation? And the billion-dollar question: what will the next big innovation be?

Kendall Square was the home of the first long-distance telephone call, the Polaroid camera, MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, which helped the Allies win World War II. In 1980s, Kendall was home to startups based on artificial intelligence, but they died quickly, and AI Alley vanished without a trace. The dot.com era came after. But the finest hour of Cambridge, MA – home to Kendall Square – was when biotechnology appeared on the scene.

Let’s flashback briefly to the summer of 1976 to get a sense of how it all began. The local newspaper had just carried a story about Harvard University’s plan to construct a genetic engineering lab, which would use DNA recombination technology, which people knew very little about at that point. The tough-minded Mayor Al Vellucci called for a hearing at City Hall. The public showed up holding up signs like, “No Recombination Without Representation,” in a throwback to that very famous episode in history – the Boston Tea Party. The historical slogan was “No Taxation Without Representation.”

Scientists on both sides of the debate – yes, there were dissenters among them too – explained the emerging technology and took questions about potential biohazards and allied dangers. A citizens review committee, which famously included a nurse and a nun, was formed to oversee the matter. This small group of non-scientists visited labs at both Harvard and MIT to gather information. By early 1977, the group recommended approving recombinant DNA research within city limits – a first in the world. The review board drew up concise guidelines which gave universities, and future companies, a clear set of rules to play by.

When the Swiss biotech company Biogen opened a lab in the city in 1982, Mayor Vellucci showed up for the ribbon cutting. Philip Sharp, who had hosted the citizen’s committee at MIT was a co-founder of Biogen and went on to win a Nobel Prize for Medicine. Like him, other top researchers at MIT, and Harvard would become faculty founders, helping translate cutting-edge research into products – a primary reason why Kendall Square is to life sciences, what Hollywood is to movies.

Among the faculty founders, Prof. Robert Langer of MIT, a scientist-entrepreneur, whose prodigious research output has earned him the nickname “Edison of Medicine,” stands out. He founded his first company in 1987, and by 2021, the list of companies had grown to over 40. One reason for the success of start-ups in the area, Prof. Langer says is the fact that well-trained young researchers – students and postdocs – want to transform their efforts in lab into tangible products in the real world. Of the companies he founded, some like Moderna remain in Kendall, while others like Living Proof, for which actor Jennifer Aniston was a spokesperson, have moved out after being acquired.

From the world of Internet companies, a startup from the 1990s which still stands tall in Kendall is Akamai (the Hawaiian word for smart or intelligent.) Its founders MIT professor Tom Leighton and his student, a former Israeli Defense Forces officer, Daniel Lewin, tackled the issue of congestion in the burgeoning Internet. They succeeded in solving the bottle neck problem by speeding up delivery of websites, videos, and apps by caching content on servers around the world. They took the internet infrastructure company public. (Lewin sadly was on the first plane from Boston to Los Angeles which flew into the World Trade Center in the 9/11 attack.)

Buderi also writes of new types of spaces which made Kendall a center for innovation. In 1999, a co-working space for Internet startups organically sprung up in the area. Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) was inspired, of all things, by the nightclub featured in the movie Casablanca. Like the owner of Café Américain, played by Humphrey Bogart, Tim Rowe, the co-founder of CIC hoped to facilitate connections and help get deals done.

More realistically, CIC was designed such that fledgling entrepreneurs could “bump and connect” with their peers, and gain insights which would help them succeed in the world of business. CIC, in turn, inspired the founding of Lab Central in Kendall, which provides a network of shared laboratory and working space for biotech and life sciences companies. Not having to worry about access to equipment or day-to-day operations, frees up researchers to focus on the science – which makes such places vital to the innovation economy.

Despite these informal workspaces, there is still room in the square for beloved spaces where people of various stripes – including scientists, construction workers and local politicians – can drop in for food and conversation. The F&T restaurant which closed in 1986 to make room for the Kendall T station was one such place. Rainier Weiss, a Nobel Laureate in physics who went there both as a student and a professor, recalls that the MIT crowd’s favorite was the round table where five or six people could squeeze in. “Scientists love to write stuff down,” he says. If they filled up the back of the paper place mat, they could go to the bar and grab a few more. “A lot of ideas came up in that place.”

There are still plenty of lively cafés and bars in the area. Sit down with a drink – you may be at the same table as professor-entrepreneurs, venture capitalists or graduate students – and feel the energy around you. Conversations flow quick and fast. Eavesdropping is inevitable because these places are small and tightly packed at peak times. Luckily, scientists don’t always speak in jargon. If you are fortunate, you can tune in to the buzz. You’ll learn of innovations and ideas that haven’t been featured in the media yet.

So, what will the next technological iteration of Kendall Square look like? In nature, thriving ecosystems keeps evolving and growing, spawning novel species, adapting to changing conditions. Innovative ecosystems evolve, the author points out, primarily through convergence of existing technologies or scientific disciples which inspire ideas, and sometimes new fields. Buderi talks to an array of leaders in diverse fields to give us an idea of what might drive Kendall’s economy a quarter century from now. Many speak of a convergence of AI, healthcare, and biology, but some also envisage scenarios without biotech. Two centuries ago, Kendall Square housed soap plants, rubber makers, iron works, tanneries, confectioners, and printing houses – and today the square is a hive of other kinds of industry. The future of Kendall Square is rife with possibilities. Now, is a good time to pick up this informative, affectionately drawn portrait of its past and present.

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Picture taken on 15, July 1966, at the inauguration of Alakananda Hostel at IIT, Madras
Janaki Seshadri is to the immediate left of Ujjal Singh, Governor of Tamil Nadu.

In 1966, Janaki Seshadri arrived at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IITM), excited to be an engineering student on a campus where spotted deer, black bucks and bonnet macaques are part of the leafy grounds. Earlier that summer, when she took the notoriously tough joint entrance examination exam at the venue in Mylapore, there was not a single other woman in the hall, she recalls. I amuse myself by thinking how many male candidates lost precious time on the test wondering about the presence of a female candidate at the exam center– an incongruity at the time.

Janaki was a student of Church Park Presentation Convent where J. Jayalalithaa, former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, was her senior. On campus, Usha Rangan of Rishi Valley School joined her. They were the first tech women to join the institute’s coveted five-year BTech program.

On July 30, 2019, IIT-M, renowned for its engineering education, turned 60. Thanks to the progressive leadership at the institute, the young women never felt out of place. The professors on the 15-member interview panel made me feel comfortable, Janaki recalls. She picked Civil Engineering as her major. (Usha would opt for Electrical Engineering.) There were just two of them in a batch of over 200 men. Their classmates took a couple of days to get used to the “intruders” in their midst, but after that things improved, Janaki wrote in the student magazine Campastimes.

In a curriculum designed to keep students on their toes, workshop week would alternate with lecture week. The women entered the machine shop, wore khaki coats over their half-saris, and picked up the tools of carpenters, welders, and fitters. Janaki recalls light-heartedly that the models they created that first week were far less impressive than the blisters and bruises on their hands. Their skills got better and prepared them for what lay ahead. “Working in a plant is quite different from coding in an air-conditioned office and being a software engineer,” Janaki says.

There were weekly periodicals and all these scores counted towards the final grade. Makeup exams and take-home exams were unheard of. When Janaki had a bout of hepatitis, she took an exam in the warden’s office. She wrote her answers in a daze and was surprised to find that she had topped the class in that subject.

Life on the verdant campus was also fun. They biked on the traffic-free avenues. On Saturdays, they enjoyed watching English films at the open-air theater under the night sky. Janaki recalls watching Lawrence of Arabia, To Sir With Love, and Dr. Zhivago. It was always English films. For a hostel day function, Janaki and Usha sang the duet “There’s a Hole in the Bucket” and won a prize for it.

On Sundays, Janaki went home to her family in Gopalapuram.  Her father was a physician and her older sister was in medical school. “Why did your parents let you go to that college in the forest?” a grand aunt, would ask with concern. “Who will ask for your (blistered) hand in marriage?”

Overall, the women in Janaki’s family were progressive. As a girl Janaki says she would follow her maternal grandmother around like “Mary’s little lamb.” The elder Janaki drove a car, dropped her lawyer husband at the High Court on workdays, and often took the grandchildren on outings. Janaki’s mother, a soft-spoken, artistically inclined woman, kept the books for her physician husband. Janaki’s mother loved mathematics, a passion she appears to have passed on to her second daughter.

Coming to America

Janaki found her soulmate in Narasimhan Raghupathi, an engineer from Bombay’s Institute of Chemical Technology who was in the PhD program at the University of Pittsburgh. In 1971, she transferred her credits to the same school in the U.S., and she did a Masters’ in structural engineering. Busy with her new life, she lost touch with her old friend Usha.

In her first job, Janaki worked for an engineering firm in Pittsburgh. Later both husband and wife found employment with the Ford Motor Company in Detroit. When she interviewed for the job – she told the hiring manager that she was pregnant with her first child though she was not showing yet. He liked her forthrightness. “I guess I could think of you as a summer intern,” he said, and gave her the job. Janaki worked at the automaker’s for nearly five years, where she enjoyed using state-of-the-art computers in the design process. Then they moved back to their hometown in the US.

In the 1970s, Indian professionals in the Pittsburgh area came together to build a Hindu temple in their new hometown. As a structural engineer, Janaki worked on the design and layout of the temple facilities; as a believer she was involved in the rituals. The landmark temple, consecrated in 1977, became a community center for Hindus. Whenever the temple staff needed assistance to navigate the American system, Janaki volunteered to help. She was even there at the birth of their American children because their wives needed an interpreter. “These women too call me Amma because, I was a stand-in for their mother,” says Janaki.

For nearly four decades, Janaki worked full-time with Westinghouse, a Pittsburgh-based company whose technology is the basis for nearly half of the world’s commercial nuclear power plants. She designed nuclear plants. She clambered up ladders, crawled into pipes, and checked the innards of reactors to find issues which could turn into big problems if not caught on time.

Earlier in her career, Janaki was an outsider in a white man’s world. “There really weren’t that many homegrown female American engineers either,” she says. So, she took people’s reservations in her stride, advanced in her career and, before long, she was helping train young entrants to the field.

Now a retiree and a grandmother, Janaki still has an active social life. But she is not a big user of social media. So, I volunteer to poke around to find her old friend, Usha Rangan. I report back to say that there is a person by that name on Facebook, about the right age, but “she doesn’t really look like an engineer.” Gently, Janaki admonishes me. There is no such thing as a person who looks like an engineer.

There was no women’s hostel on campus in 1966. Apart from the tech women, there were female graduate students studying one of the pure sciences. There was no female faculty yet.

Because there was no girls’ hostel, all sixteen of the women took residence in the staff quarters and, later, at the top floor of the hostel meant for Central School students. Food would arrive at mealtimes from the mess of the men’s hostel – mostly on time.

In 2019, there are four hostels for women on the IIT Madras campus: Sarayu, Sabarmathi, Sharavathi, and Tunga. There are nearly 2000 women on campus of which close to 300 women are B.Techs. Approximately ten percent of the faculty are women.

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Quark, a boardless eatery at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, was a student haunt.  Deep inside the campus, flanked by hostels, the canteen would open late in the evening. As students, we went there for an after-dinner snack or a hot drink, so we could tackle study material, or work on problem sets late into the night. At least that was always the intent.

The tech school in the urban forest campus celebrates its sixtieth birthday this year, but Quark has not been around for that long. Alumni, including the current dean of students, were happy to help me get the origin story. Those who’d frequented the canteen shared their memories.

In the early 1980s, when the students asked for a canteen that would serve them after the mess in the individual hostels closed each day, the director green-lighted the project. Students went on to design and build the canteen themselves with guidance from professors who taught structural engineering

Retired Prof. P.S. Rao recalls that the students wanted something which would look different from the flat beam and column structures all over campus. Students made components of the umbrella-shaped roof in the lab and erected the structure with a make-shift crane. The crane, with its limited lifting capacity, decided the size of the canteen.

The tiny canteen got a name that honored its size. Quark is a subatomic particle, smaller than a proton or neutron, and is a basic constituent of all matter in the universe. Theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann postulated that the neutron and proton could be made up of three particles with fractional charges, which he called quarks. The Nobelist told lexicographers that the name quark came from James Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake inspired by the pub owner’s call of “Three quarks for Muster Mark.”

The name fit. The name was so widely accepted that the builders decided no name board was necessary. “It was the only eating joint for students on campus, and students gravitated towards Quark naturally, in the evenings, and after dinner, so there was no board,” explains Prof. C.V.R. Murty, one of the student-architects of Quark.

At first, Quark sold tea, coffee and some snacks. Students arranged for cooks, organized the supplies, and kept the books. Sometimes, they even did the cooking. Quark lost its student-run status after an embezzlement issue came to light. The editor of the student magazine thundered in print on the deplorability of corruption, and how those who steal public funds should not be allowed to go scot-free. The authorities turned the management of Quark over to people in the food business. This was just as well because it meant students of the 1990s, like me, got an extensive menu.

The fried rice at Quark is a memorable item for many. Flecked with green beans, capsicum, and tiny cubes of carrots, this dish was always a treat for the taste buds. For an extra rupee, you could even add bits of scrambled egg to rice. Whether you were escaping from the uranium-yellow lemon rice or idli-sambar dinner, you were grateful for this warm, flavorful food. Kheema dosa, noodles and pao bhaji were other staples. Everything was reasonably priced.

Quark’s menu was beside the point really. If you were an inmate of Sarayu, the only girl’s hostel on campus back then, you went to the canteen because you could. Riding a bicycle, enjoying the cool night breeze, and hanging out with friends was a treat. Elsewhere in the city, getting out at a late hour for coffee or tea, would be impossible for a spirited girl or even a whole gaggle of them. Quark, then, gave some of us Sarayuites, with strict curfews at home, that first taste of freedom.

What else was Quark good for? Students sat on the steps or the cuboid concrete blocks, a stand-in for café furniture, nursed their beverages, and took big decisions. Which electives to pick, how to pass courses with tough instructors, or, finally, which American university’s admission offer to accept. Quark was an informal venue for skits, a soapbox during student elections, and a brain-storming base for the altruistic to plan relief work. In the devastating cyclone of 1985, when some hapless residents of the neighboring villages of Taramani and Velachery lost their lives, and others lost their homes, survivors took shelter in the Student Activities Center building. Student volunteers gathered at Quark to decide on how best to help the villagers, Prof. Murty recalls.

No one who studied in IIT in the previous century will recognize the canteen in its new avatar. A multi-cuisine restaurant has sprung up at the spot. The place has a huge board that says Quark, but students willfully ignore the sign and refer to the eatery by the name of the restaurant chain, I’m told. Not too long ago, I went to the place, in the late afternoon, with a former Sarayuite, who is now a professor at the institute. We had rotis with bhindi masala and dhal fry for lunch.

It was broad daylight, but everything tasted delicious. The new restaurant sits exactly where that original structure once stood, a reminder that the campus still rests on the work of students who imagined a space and then constructed it, piece by piece, with a crane that could lift only so much.

What started it all? The bad food on campus obviously. Read all about it in an issue from the campus magazine of 1970s — 

NotSoCosy 

and Quark | IITM Heritage Centre

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On a winter’s day in January 1975, two men walked down the sandy stretch of the Marina Beach in Chennai. It was still afternoon, but there was a breeze blowing, and they had the place pretty much to themselves. One was a teenager, a final year BSc student from the city’s Vivekananda College; the other an older, frail-looking foreigner. Initially, the older man asked about some landmarks on that stretch, including the impressive Indo-Saracenic building which houses the University of Madras, but after that the conversation centered on a topic in advanced mathematics – additive arithmetic functions. Clearly, this man was no ordinary tourist.

Paul Erdős, the legendary Hungarian mathematician, was on his first trip to Chennai, or Madras, as it was called then. At the age of 21, he had earned his PhD from the University of Budapest in 1934. In the next six decades, he would go on to publish over 1500 papers, an unsurpassed record. He made fundamental contributions to certain branches of mathematics – number theory, in particular – and pioneered discrete mathematics, the foundation of computer science. A bachelor, he had no permanent job or home address. In the pre-Internet era, he connected researchers across the globe who might otherwise have toiled away on problems on their own, making little headway. His life’s mission to discover, and nurture, young mathematicians.

The young man who discussed additive functions with him on the beach was Alladi Krishnaswami, son of Alladi Ramakrishnan, the founder-director of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (MatScience) in Taramani. Ramakrishnan had invited many Nobel laureates in the sciences to the southern capital to talk about their work, but Erdős had come mainly to speak to Krishnaswami.

Krishnaswami, who is now a professor of mathematics at the University of Florida, Gainesville, recalls how he had contacted the nomadic genius in the first place. As a BSc student, working on an independent project on number theory, he had made some discoveries and had come up with questions, which no one around him knew the answers to. He spoke to many people in the field in India and abroad. One name came up a lot – Erdős, but no one knew his exact whereabouts. So, they advised him to write to this expert in number theory c/o The Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Within a month, Erdős wrote back saying that he was going speak at a symposium at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta that year — could they meet there? 

Krishnaswami’s paper had also been accepted for the symposium, but he had his college half-yearly examinations and couldn’t possibly travel to Calcutta that week. So, his father, an invited speaker at the symposium, offered to present the paper. Krishnaswami recounts that at the end of the presentation, Erdős, came up to his father and said, “I am very pleased to meet you, but I’d be much happier to meet your son.” Erdős was leaving for Australia the next week but was happy to re-route that trip via Madras. He agreed to give a few lectures at Matscience as well. This speaks volumes of his generosity, and his passion to encourage young mathematicians, says Krishnaswami. When he went to the airport to receive the visitor, he recalls being nervous. Erdős broke the ice by reciting a poem about Madras.

This is the city of Madras

The home of the curry and the dhal

Where Iyers speak only to Iyengars

And Iyengars speak only to God.

Erdős explained that he’d modelled it after the ditty, based on the old families in the New England area.

This is good old Boston

The home of the bean and the cod

Where the Lowells speak to the Cabots

And the Cabots speak only to God.

Old New England families are collectively known as the “Boston Brahmins.” The stereotype goes that these aristocrats value education from elite universities, appreciate the classical arts, and shun any ostentatious display of wealth. In Madras, Tamil Brahmins (Tam-Brahms) are either Iyers or Iyengars. Worshippers of Shiva, Iyers are known to pray at the temples of Iyengars. Iyengars, however, tend to worship only Vishnu.  It is remarkable that Erdős understood this nuance. On the drive to the Matscience campus in Taramani, conversation flowed. Erdős, who stayed at the campus guest house, was a light eater. He enjoyed the local dishes with a side of yogurt to cut any hint of spiciness, says Krishnaswami, who was with Erdős’s throughout the trip.

Erdős also met the Governor of Tamil Nadu, K. K. Shah who was amazed that such a frail-looking man could withstand the rigors of international travel. Erdős explained that he wanted to collaborate with local talent everywhere. The minute he heard of the governor’s fund for scholarships to high school students who excelled in mathematics, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheaf of rupee notes – the amount he was given for lectures in Madras – and donated it to the fund.

Before he left, Erdős asked Krishnaswami about his plans for graduate school. Then and there, he wrote him a letter of recommendation to University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Ernst Straus, who had worked with Albert Einstein on relativity, would be his thesis advisor. It was a perfect fit, says Krishnaswami. In the fall of ‘75, he started graduate studies with a full fellowship in the US.

Erdős liked to fund worthy causes, not just math-related ones. On another trip to Chennai, when he heard of mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan’s destitute widow, he wrote her a check. This quirky genius gave away most of his earnings. He never had a chance to meet Ramanujan whose work was an inspiration but read a great deal about India to make up for that. Another thing Erdős liked to do was put up prize money for problems in mathematics – the amount varied according to the level of difficulty. He had few possessions and traveled the world, solving and posing research problems with collaborators.

Mathematicians of the 20^th century like to brag about their Erdős number. Every coauthor of Erdős has the coveted Erdős number of 1. Krishnaswami has written five papers with Erdős, the first of which was based on the topic they discussed that afternoon on the Marina Beach. (That resulted in the Alladi- Erdős theorem, which Krishnaswami says remains a highly cited paper.) Publishing with Erdӧs’s coauthor would give a person an Erdős number of 2. Ramanujan had an Erdős number of 2. Though they never met, both had co-authored papers with the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy.  Einstein has an Erdős number of 2 via Straus. Erdos, who was at the center of it all, has an Erdős number of 0. (Recently, I learned that a friend’s son, a 21st century mathematician, has an Erdos Number of 4!)

Today, no one can earn an Erdős number of 1. In 1996, Erdős died of a heart attack at the age of 83, when he was attending a conference in Poland. Erdős didn’t just connect ideas; he connected people. He navigated the world with little more than a passport, a suitcase, and a head full of unsolved problems—gifting the currency of encouragement wherever he went. His generosity wasn’t performative—it was instinctive. And his brand of mentorship carried a kind of mathematical clarity: notice those with potential, support them without fanfare and move on.

Krishnaswami Alladi, who edited his father’s memoir, The Alladi Diary, is currently writing his own memoir entitled “Mathematics: People, Personalities, and the Profession” to be published by World Scientific.

Priyanka Pulla’s article on other Indian mathematicians with an Erdos Number.

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Next time you are at a social gathering, try this little experiment. Ask friends and family to name a female scientist. Most will come up with the name of Nobel laureate Marie Curie; some may mention the unsung Rosalind Franklin. No one seems to know of accomplished Indian women in science. Our textbooks don’t speak of such pioneering figures; newspapers (including The Hindu) rarely run substantive profiles of contemporary researchers anymore.

This anthology of essays, now available online, featuring nearly one hundred Indian women scientists — from the Victorian era to our times — fills a void then. Every chapter is the story of a woman scientist of India. Contemporary women give first-person accounts of what brought them to the field of research and what keeps them going. Amateur writers present the narratives of memorable personalities who are no more. Their stories are compelling even when the writing lacks finesse.

The title is a miniature story in itself. Lilavati was the daughter of the renowned 12th-century mathematician, Bhaskaracharya. In his classical treatise, he addresses problems in algebra, geometry, and discrete mathematics to his playful, doe-eyed daughter. We don’t know if Lilavati became a mathematician herself but the fact that her accomplished father deemed her worthy of solving these complex problems suggests that she must have been brilliant. The women in Lilavati Daughters are all inheritors of her intellectual legacy.

Inspiring example

Nowadays, scores of students go abroad to study science, but imagine the incredible journey of Anandibai Joshi, the first Hindu woman to obtain a medical degree in the United States in 1886. Back then, America must have seemed no less distant than the moon. Alone in an alien land, this 19-year-old stuck to her vegetarianism, her saris, and a resolve to qualify herself to serve her female compatriots who would sooner die than allow a male doctor to examine them. But the severe winters took a toll on her health, and like the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, she eventually succumbed to tuberculosis. Her story is presented as a first-person narrative.

Sudha Murthy, chairperson of Infosys Foundation, challenged the House of Tatas rule of not employing female engineers at their factory. But if shop floors were not considered fit workplaces for women, in an earlier era, laboratories too were deemed inappropriate spaces for them, we learn. One person who resisted the entry of young women researchers into the prestigious Indian Institute of Science was the director Sir C.V. Raman himself. The essay “The Scientist Lady” tells us of the chemist Kamala Sohonie who staged a Gandhi-style protest outside the Nobel laureate’s office in 1933 till she was admitted as a research student at the institute.

Ridiculous convention

More than one person from the post-independence era mentions years of separation from their spouses because of an inability to find appropriate work in the same city. This seems particularly true of couples in science. Unfortunately, the unwritten rule, which states that spouses should not be appointed in the same division, is faithfully followed in research institutes in our country, says Dr. D. Balasubramanian, President, Indian Academy of Sciences. The essay on the gifted chemist Darshan Ranganathan who was not offered a faculty position at IIT, Kanpur because her husband was a professor there, makes us livid at this oblivious system.

This timely anthology is a long-overdue acknowledgement of the struggles and triumphs of women scientists in our midst. A wider range of career choices are open to bright young people today, but scientists are still vital for any knowledge-based economy. Girls who want that life in science will find many role models here. Every school and college library in India should order copies of the book right away. But readers don’t have to be women, scientists, or someone who is keen on science to enjoy the best of these inspiring real-life stories.

Read here. html.

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Cambridge, MA (November, 2012) Plugging into sources of energy within our body — such as heat, internal motion or metabolites — to power implanted medical devices has long been the goal of biomedical engineers. Now researchers based in Cambridge, Massachusetts have demonstrated that a sensing device embedded in the ear can be powered by the ear’s own electrochemical battery.

Our auditory system picks up external sounds and sends information to the brain in the form of neural signals. When the sound wave hits the ear, the eardrum vibrates in response. This mechanical energy must be converted into an appropriate electrochemical impulse.

Deep inside the ear, the cochlea perceives the frequency of the vibration. It maintains a gradient of potassium and sodium ions across a delicate membrane via a system of pumps and channels. This natural battery, which makes neurotransmission of sound possible, generates a net positive voltage.

Researchers have known about the existence of this endocochlear potential (EP) for decades but had not devised ways of using this voltage without interfering with the mammal’s hearing, says Konstantina Stankovic, otologic surgeon at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, medical lead of the collaborative team. “New electrodes and new electronics had to be developed to make safe harvesting of energy possible,” she says.

Prof. Anantha Chandrakasan’s group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed the chip to extract current from the ear, keeping in mind the many physiological constraints. In the prototype, the harnessed power drives a wireless sensor that can monitor the value of the EP. A radio transmitter relays data to the clinician who uses the numbers to gauge the ear’s condition. Though our ear functions on EP ranging from 70-100 millivolts, this voltage is not enough for electronic implants. “Since the power from the source is so small, we accumulate energy on a capacitor. Once the capacitor fills up, it can drive a higher power electronic circuit,” says Chandrakasan. “We power a 2.4 Gigahertz radio in this case.”

But transistor-based electronics need hundreds of millivolts to start. A wireless receiver on the integrated circuit gets a short burst of radio waves to kick-start the system. The setup, implanted in the ear of a guinea pig, could transmit data for five hours without compromising normal hearing. Design optimization and more testing lie ahead.

“Thus far, we have demonstrated feasibility of sensing the EP, powered by the EP,” says Stankovic. “But we are eager to couple this energy-harvesting chip to a variety of molecular and chemical sensors to sense the inner ear and its environment and identify the most promising biomarkers relevant for the ultimate human application.”

The device cannot power multichannel cochlear implants or hearing aids as yet. But Charley C. Della Santina, professor of Otolaryngology and biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, who is unconnected to the research team, points out that there is a real need for a system that can monitor the EP in animal models of Meniere’s disease — an inner ear disorder that affects balance and hearing. And this device may just fit the bill. Plus, the data collected in vivo could transform our understanding of how the mammalian ear works, says Stankovic. The paper that describes the findings appears in the latest issue of Nature Biotechnology.

Notes:

Recent Advances in Energy Harvesting from the Human Body for Biomedical Applications

Feb 8, 2008

An energy-efficient microchip
A cell phone dying at a crucial moment, a digital camera that warns of low power at a perfect photo opportunity or a laptop inopportunely running out of juice — many of us have had such vexing experiences firsthand.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Texas Instruments (TI) have designed a chip, ten times more energy-efficient than existing ones, to keep portable devices going longer.

Because of the lower power consumption, the batteries of these mobile devices and vital medical implants do not have to be recharged or replaced as frequently as they are now.

Although users tend to be excited by new features on gadgets, every additional feature — like the ability to watch video clips or take snapshots on a cell phone — puts a burden on the battery’s limited power.

Clearly, a new approach to chip design was in order because saddling such portable devices with bigger and better batteries can only take us so far. In such devices, the key to turn down power consumption was the voltage, says Prof. Anantha Chandrakasan, Director of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories .

The longevity of the battery comes from the chip’s lower voltage requirement.

The operating voltage for circuits on a chip is typically 1 volt but the new chip can operate at just 0.3 volts. An important feature of this new chip’s design is a high-efficiency DC-to-DC converter — akin to an in-situ step-down transformer — that slashes the input voltage to one third of its strength.

Traditionally, the circuits on such chips have been optimised to operate at a supply voltage of around 1 volt. Scaling down the supply voltage has huge implications.

Memory and logic circuits had to be redesigned to operate at 0.3 volts, a voltage low enough to disrupt the chip’s very functionality, says Chandrakasan, the leader of the chip’s re-architecture team.

Besides, the team also had to overcome the variability inherent in chip manufacturing. At this lower supply voltage, variations and imperfections in the silicon chip could throw the electronic circuit out of whack; in the binary system what was registered as 1 could become 0 and vice versa. Designing the chip to minimize its vulnerability at the new voltage was a huge challenge.

“These design techniques show great potential for TI’s future low-power integrated circuit products and applications including wireless terminals, battery-operated instrumentation, sensor networks and medical electronics,” says Dr. Dennis Buss, chief scientist at Texas Instruments.

Networking devices

Portable and embedded medical devices, such as hearing aids and retinal implants, communications and networking devices based on such chips will consume only a tenth of the current power.

A person who now watches short clips on a cell phone, for instance, can view longer videos without the need to recharge. There could also be a variety of military applications in the production of tiny, self-contained sensor networks that could be dispersed in a battlefield.

Eventually, in medical devices the idea is to make the power requirement so low that they could run on ‘ambient energy’ — using the body’s own heat or movement to provide the requisite power.

The ultimate goal is to design a generator on a chip, eliminating the need for a battery, says Chandrakasan.

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