JOIN USObaid Siddiqi, one of India’s foremost biologists and former director of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, passed away on Friday. He was 81.
Born in 1932 in Uttar Pradesh, Siddiqi received his early education at Aligarh Muslim University. He obtained his PhD from the University of Glasgow and carried out post-doctoral research at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and University of Pennsylvania in the USA.
In 1962, at the invitation of Homi Bhabha, he set up the molecular biology unit at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai that in many ways initiated modern biology research in India. Thirty years later, he became the founding director of the NCBS.
His pioneering research on the genetic basis of taste and smell in the fruit fly (Drosophila) in the 1980s paved the way for modern understanding of how senses such as taste and smell are detected and encoded in the brain. His previous work gave a deeper understanding in some of the areas in behavioural genetics.