Weekend Musing: Beyond the Boundaries of Science

The vision of Pushpa Mitra Bhargava

In my last Musing, I had shared my experience with train travel, and how it turned out to be quietly educative. That experience has, in a way, continued during my stay out of town.

For the last week, I have been staying on the campus of one of India’s premier research organisations in the interdisciplinary areas of modern biology — the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology  (CCMB), which functions under the aegis of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

During this period, the Annual Conference on Proteomics and Metabolomics was being held, where scientists from across the country were presenting their research. I attended a few sessions, briefly donning a borrowed scientist’s hat, and listening in with the seriousness the setting demanded. Unlike many other professions, when it comes to the scientific community, if one carries a certain mental image of how scientists look, one is unlikely to be far off. Casual in appearance, slightly dishevelled, some sporting long hair, and largely lacking the urbane polish of bankers, chartered accountants, or corporate executives — they fit the prototype rather well.

What struck me most was the level of academic and scientific rigour. The areas of study were already narrow, but the research questions within them were even more finely focused. And yet, even in these specialised domains, there were vast unknowns — protein expression, transport across membranes, detecting critical regulatory proteins across their enormous dynamic range — areas clearly calling for deeper exploration. The questions that followed each presentation revealed something important: no research exists in isolation. It is a deeply collaborative process, cutting across laboratories, institutions, and even national boundaries. Methods, techniques, interpretations, and results were openly discussed, often exposing gaps and possibilities for further work.

I was told that the CCMB campus houses forty-five research laboratories in biology alone, each headed by a principal scientist. There are around four to five hundred research students working here. Each laboratory is well equipped with sophisticated instruments, with investments running into crores of rupees. I visited one such laboratory and was struck not only by the work being done, but also by the sense of ownership and responsibility displayed by the students. Research here runs round the clock; many experiments stretch into odd hours and demand continuous monitoring. It is therefore common to see people moving in and out at all times, dressed informally, absorbed in their work.

I was also taken to a cold room maintained at a constant four degrees Celsius, and shown large freezers operating at minus thirty degrees for the preservation of critical samples. There was the microscopy facility — a permanently darkened room housing ultra–high-resolution electron microscopes such as SEM and TEM — along with the Atomic Force Microscope and the recently acquired Cryo-EM. PCR machines, centrifuges, autoclaves — it felt like a walk through a quiet wonderland of scientific capability, far removed from anything I had earlier imagined.

As I began to understand the scale and depth of what I was seeing, I learnt that this entire institution was the vision of one man — Pushpa Mitra Bhargava (1928–2017). His scientific contributions have been widely recognised, with over fifty major national and international awards, including the Padma Bhushan.

Beyond his own research, Bhargava brought several forward-looking practices to the institution. He championed the centralisation of high-value instruments and shared facilities, allowing laboratories to book time on specialised equipment instead of duplicating resources. He also conceived a separate Animal House — a significant inclusion for a research institution — with dedicated, controlled environments, including an entire floor for breeding, designed to maintain the integrity and consistency of genetic lines used in experiments. In addition, he introduced one of the earliest biological waste incineration facilities, recognising the environmental hazards such waste posed long before it became a regulatory concern.

Yet for all his contributions, he is perhaps better known for his deep engagement with social issues, particularly those concerning the role and responsibility of science in Indian society.

Bhargava was outspoken and highly influential in arguing that scientific temper was not merely an academic virtue, but a civic duty that needed active cultivation. When he felt that this space for rational inquiry and dissent was being steadily eroded, and found little support from the government, he returned his Padma Bhushan in 2015 as a protest against what he described as the narrowing of democratic spaces.

Here was a man who fought for a cause that went beyond his own work or recognition. For Bhargava, science was inseparable from responsibility — not only to knowledge, but to society at large. His public positions, and even the return of his Padma Bhushan, did not arise from a sense of sacrifice or defiance, but from an inner consistency that could not be negotiated. When certain values were compromised, stepping aside became inevitable. Purpose, in this context, was not the pursuit of success or happiness as commonly understood, but a steady alignment with what felt right and true.

Seen against the living, breathing institution he helped create, it becomes clear that such lives are sustained not by comfort or acclaim, but by a deeper clarity — one that quietly absorbs hardship without naming it as such, and leaves behind something enduring.

You may also want to read my piece on:  Weekday Musings: When Emotional Honesty Speaks Louder Than Words

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