A new journal of quantitative biosciences from nano to macro
Vidyanand Nanjundiah
After some moving around between small towns in southern India (Latur, Sholapur), a city (Hyderabad) and a hill station (Coonoor), my matriculation took place in 1963 from Don Bosco High School in Mumbai, then Bombay. A four-year stint as a B.Sc. student at St. Xavier's College came next, with physics (principal) and mathematics (subsidiary) as the main subjects. Chemistry, Mathematics and English were taught excellently and one used to hear about the interesting work going on in the History department. Any inclination towards biology was kept at bay by the quality of instruction in Botany and Zoology. The question of making a switch to mathematics as the principal subject kept recurring, but physics retained its grip. Prof. R V Kamat was primarily responsible for this. After the B.Sc. there was a personally enriching and academically dispiriting year at IIT Powai.
Entry into the Physics Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago followed in September 1968. The 'U of C' allowed seemingly infinite freedom. But because of the demanding atmosphere, especially in the Physics department with its forbidding history - there were still people around who could recall seeing Enrico Fermi discussing quantum electrodynamics with his students while working on a lathe - , the freedom was more possible than real. The importance of critical thinking dominated above all else. Many worked out a compromise, namely to be well-organised in spurts. With all that there was not much stress, thanks mainly to fellow-students. The bulk of the research that went into my thesis seemed to have got done within a hectic six month period at the very end.
A latent liking for biology slowly reawakened during the stay in Chicago. There were many reasons. The chief one was that Morrel Cohen, my research supervisor, had become interested in applying ideas of self-organisation to biological systems, specifically to the cellular slime moulds. He was one of a small group largely made up from other departments that constituted a Committee on Mathematical Biology, later Department of Theoretical Biology. It included Jack Cowan, Richard Lewontin, Richard Levins, Stuart Rice, Stuart Kauffman, and Art Winfree. Through them I got to listen to other biologists and near-biologists (including Ilya Prigogine, Michael Gaze and René Thom). The experience was wonderful because there was a substantial amount of biology that could be picked up by 'osmosis', without any necessity to pass exams, which would have been impossible, or otherwise show what one had learnt.
Looking back, the most significant aspect of being in the company of theoretical biologists was that I got to know Stuart Newman, who became a life-long friend and someone from whom I have continued learning (not just biology). A course on developmental biology given by Alberto Monroy of the Naples Zoological Station was an eye-opener, not least for Monroy's blackboard artistry. When my stay was coming to a close, the question cropped up on what to do next. My first choice, to join Elliot Montroll and work with him to learn how to apply the methods of statistical mechanics to study the dynamics of interacting populations, fell through - he was going abroad. One day a casual look in the library turned up a paper on wave propagation in amphibian embryos. None of the other papers in the journal - Roux' Archiv - was understandable. Amazingly, a letter to the author, Koki Hara, produced a quick, friendly and positive response along with an offer to work with axolotl embryos for one year in the Hubrecht Laboratory in Utrecht. Theo Konijn, who was known to be by name as one of the discoverers of cyclic AMP as the long-sought 'acrasin', had just left the Hubrecht for Leiden but dropped by frequently and kept me supplied with cellular slime mould amoebae. Even though the work on early axolotl development went nowhere, I managed to show that the dorsal lip of the blastopore could attract slime mould amoebae. Koki Hara's help and expertise made it possible for their aggregation waves to be filmed and interpreted. That led to a further three years of post-doc-ing in the laboratory of Günther Gerisch, initially in the Max-Planck-Institut, Tübingen, and then in the Biozentrum, Basel, to carry out experiments on signalling in cellular slime mould amoebae.
My first independent academic appointment was at the Centre for Theoretical Studies, Indian Institute of Science. It was an ideal place in which to begin an independent life in research, a true haven. Looking back, it is hard to imagine what a friendly and nurturing place it was and how few were the demands made on a young faculty member 33 years ago. I moved to the Molecular Biology Group, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay, four years later and returned to the Indian Institute of Science after spending seven years there. My research continues to be on the development of pattern and evolution of social behaviour in the cellular slime moulds. The evolution of phenotypic plasticity is a second and related interest. Apart from Stuart Newman, John Bonner has been a continuing source of advice, encouragement and inspiration throughout my scientific life.
Our work with the cellular slime moulds makes it plausible that individual-level selection within groups and group-level selection both have a role to play in the social life of these organisms. Social behaviour seems to depend on the ability of an amoeba to exhibit different phenotypes - in fact, complementary phenotypes, with the factors behind the differences being many (and not restricted to differences in the genotype). Even before the onset of the social phase, phenotypic heterogeneity is a characteristic feature of cellular slime mould physiology. We continue to study phenotypic variation between genetically identical amoebae and the extent to which such variation can be transmitted across generations. Ongoing research is focussed on looking for correlations between genetic variation within social groups in the wild and the intensity of cooperative behaviour in such groups.
