At a time when the World Economic Forum has sounded the global concern about emerging tuberculosis threat, and its possible crippling impact on the economy, it is a matter of national pride that Indian scientists have not been lagging in research on the tuberculosis bug.
That was thanks largely to the pioneering molecular work on the M.tuberculosis bug done by Dr T Ramakrishnan, who passed away last month. Friends and colleagues who have worked with him remember how he kept the work going at a time when the west was largely uninterested in TB, considering it a Third World disease.
TB claims millions even today and the 2006 figures show 1.6 million who succumbed to it and not just in the developing world! With the combined danger of HIV and TB, there is renewed attention on the disease.
Ramakrishnan's work is a benchmark even today for scientists working on the TB bug, says Dr Gopinath, his colleague at the Microbiology and Cell Biology Department which he helped establish at the IISc.
While drugs for TB had been developed, the pathogen had developed resistance to these. Ramakrishnan was keen on working on a virulent strain of the bacilli to study its metabolic activity as different from the avirulent strain, something which he believed explained the difference between the two strains.
It was his suggestion that led to the documentation of the many pathways in the breakdown of the carbohydrates in the mycobacteria and eventually to the discovery of an enzyme that became an important drug target in 2000.
When molecular biology was still in its infancy, the visionary he was, Ramakrishnan recognised its importance as a vital tool and went on to establish a molecular biology lab almost single-handedly. Eventually, he was able to isolate the mycobacteriophage I3 and do significant studies of the mycobacteria and its drug resistance.
He started the animal and plant tissue culture facilities at IISc, which was used to study the Rous sarcoma and rinderpest virus, work on which continues at the department. It was he who nucleated this work, believe his colleagues.
Ramakrishnan believed in the importance of basic science and kept abreast of the developments till his last days when he succumbed to ailing health. He was 86.
