On Single-Sex Labs
India’s first Nobelist C.V. Raman maintained a strict separation of sexes in his laboratory, his student Anna Mani recalls in this profile by Abha Sur.
Raman would mutter “Scandalous!” every time a male and a female student walked together by his window. With a touch of amusement, Mani noted that Raman must have had an uncanny sense, for even while bending over a microscope, he would be able to catch a glimpse of an “offending” couple. She remembered one incident vividly. She was talking to Nagamani, one of her male colleagues in the laboratory. In the middle of a sentence, Nagamani looked up to find Raman at a distance, cycling slowly (“like a big bear”) toward them. Nagamani turned pale and fled the scene as fast as he could, she recalled, “leaving me to face the music alone.”