The prestigious Royal Society in London witnessed an unique honour for the Ramakrishnan family. Parents C.V.Ramakrishnan and his wife Rajalakshmi made the journey from Chennai [Madras] to witness their son Venkataraman Ramakrishnan, President of the Royal Society and chemistry Nobel Laureate (2009), greeting his sister Lalita Ramakrishnan on her election as Fellow of the Royal Society. The FRS against a name has long been a symbol of the elect.
Father C.V. Ramakrishanan, as Professor, set up the Biochemistry Department at the Mahasraja Sayajirao University in 1955; his son Ventakataraman, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on ribosomal structure, was knighted by the Queen in 2012, while daughter Lalita has done path-breaking work on tuberculosis as Professor of Immunology in the Department of Medicine at Cambridge University, where her brother is also based.
There is no parallel in the history of the Royal Society of a brother has presided over his sister’s admission with their parents looking on and enjoying the moment with pride and satisfaction. In the society’s register, ‘there are 1,600 Fellows and Foreign Members, including 80 Nobel laureates’.
Lalita started her medical career in India before moving to the US for further studies, where she earned her PhD in immunology, and clinical fellowship in infectious diseases followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University and commenced her TB research. After a spell at the University of Washington, she joined Cambridge University in 2014.
Lalita’s FRS citation states that she ‘pioneered a zebra fish model of tuberculosis that has enabled her to uncover fundamental new mechanisms of disease pathogenesis infection of genetically tractable and optically transparent larvae with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, has altered the detailed live tracking of infection in the context of genetic manipulation of hoist and pathogen.’
The citation concluded: ‘The resultant molecular and cellular details of how the bacteria and host defences interact at each early step of tuberculosis have yielded surprising fundamental insights that suggest entirely new approaches to treat human tuberculosis.’
Should Lalita Ramakrishnan’s researches lead to the effective treatment and cure for the present revival of the dreaded TB, she might join her distinguished brother as a Nobel laureate.
Readers may wish to read Bill Bryson’s superbly edited work, ‘Seeing Further: The Story of Science & the Royal Society’, described appropriately by Melvyn Bragg, ‘As an inspiring celebration of science, past, present and future.’
The Royal Society’s boasts such hallowed names as the peerless Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, et al. Its Latin motto Nullus in verba [take nobody’s word as proven] has reverberated down the centuries after its founding in London in 1663, a little more than a decade after the iconic Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which brought an end to the ruinous Thirty Years’ War that had laid waste Germany and much of northern Europe. The spirit of inquiry led to a thirst for knowledge and yielded such riches for the mind and body to guarantee European ascendancy in every branch of human endeavour. The rest of the civilized world today measures itself by the standards and achievements of the European age of discovery.
Shifting templates of global order
The erosion of the old global order fashioned by American power and hegemony appears to be splitting at the seams. US narratives on human rights, democracy, the rule of law and much else are being subjected to close critical scrutiny in the cold light of ground realities. As the world’s foremost superpower since the Second World War, the United States dominated the air waves and print media as the exemplar of these values. The term Revolution was pressed into service in the story of of the American Republic, its manifold material achievements through its entrepreneurial spirit, its science and technology, its cinema and mass entertainment, its excceptionalism, its Manifest Destiny.
The gilded message of the Immaculate Conception was seriously flawed from its birth. America’s Independence from British colonial rule was fomented by a rebellion against unjust taxation. It was nor a revolution such as its contemporary French Revolution which remade the inherited social order, where the Republic’s citizens, white and black, were deemed free. In the United States, ‘the pursuit of happiness’ of its Constitution was restricted to the white population. The founders of the Republic – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and their colleagues and successors were owners of plantations run with black slave labour. Those who were otherwise employed kept slaves as domestic workers. Private property was sacrosanct. The great Dr Samuel Johnson, a firm Monarchist, asked, ‘Do I hear yelps of freedom from the drivers of Negro slaves.’
The white colonists expropriated the land of the indigenous peoples and proceeded to slaughter them and encage them in Reservations. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 was the starter’s gun for imperial expansion. These warts have been largely excised from the approved historical texts. Their re-emergence in multiplying forms over the past 70 years has undermined cherished myths and mythologies, leading to convulsive phobias of foreign threats to American security and well-being.
The American presidency was shorn of its pristine plumage by the Vietnam war; the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, the CIA’s torture chambers in those parts, and in favoured European hideouts in Poland, Lithuania and Rumania, have exposed to the light long embalmed truths pertaining to the Korean war, and the true reasons behind the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The tide of disposed humanity from the Middle East and North Africa braving the perils of the deep, desperate to reach European shores has reduced the once shining American dream to a gruesome parody.
A dying empire invariably comes up with bizarre leaders. President Donald Trump’s bafflingly capricious mood swings, is breaking the mould, most alarmingly for his domestic critics, by seeking accommodation with Russia. The apoplectic frenzy of the US media and the mainstream political class tells of disordered minds in need of urgent counseling.
The President well understands that the US and Russia are the world’s two military superpowers. Russia’s second display of graphics of its new generation of armaments (to restore the balance violated by NATO’s expansion to Russia’s shores, says Moscow) makes a stable US-Russian relationship imperative. A Third World War will destroy all life on earth, which surely includes the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Murdoch press in Britain, the BBC and CNN and toxic Western news agencies.. They have the right to live and prosper, but so do we.
Lack of trust muddies Indo-UK ties
Sir Richard Stagg, a former British High Commissioner to India from 2007-11, criticized British governments for disjointed policies towards India, which had failed to realize the potential of what could be a rewarding relationship for both parties. The British government ‘doesn’t have a strategy’ for India, relying instead on a ‘random interventions’ by individuals within government that were ‘invariably ineffective.’
He pointed to India’s concerns pertaining to Britain’s relations with Pakistan, the asylum sought by errant Indian business oligarchs like Vijay Mallya and Nirav Modi and the difficulties India faced in extraditing them, the corrosive arguments over student visas and Indian over-staying in the UK add to the combustible mix. That such people do exist is not contested, but the British figure of 100,000 out of nowhere, and the demand that they quit British shores in 15 days raised hackles in New Delhi. The tactless remark by Britain’s Trade Secretary that the issue of student visas were somehow linked over-staying Indians hardly eased the situation.
Sir Richard Stagg relates the fiasco the India-EU negotiations on a Free Trade Agreement, which he led. The British insistence that India open up its market to financial and legal services ended in deadlock. The Europeans, for their part, were not terribly interested in financial services, still less legal sector.
‘We need to be calm, patient and realistic and find some genuine shared interests for developing a more mature and successful relationship. That takes time and acceptance,’ said Sir Richard.
Few would disagree. Brexit is a continuing distraction for Britain, hence India, too, must bide its time. Dean Acheson, the US Secretary of State in the Truman Administration, remarked that, ‘Britain had lost an empire and not found a role.’ That undiscovered role should fit Great Britain rather than Little England.
