BENGALURU: From those who have worked on sexual violence and jurisprudence to the biodiversity of Indian ecosystems, to new point-of-care testing platform for PCR-based medical diagnostics, six scientists and social scientists with years of experience behind them won the Infosys Science Award at the 13th edition on Thursday.
The awardees in six fields were given a pure gold medal, a citation and a prize-purse of USD 100,000. Jurists said that the award was given to work carried out over many years and the two years of hard time during COVID did not affect the choice they made.
One of the awardees, Chandrasekhar Nair, CTO of Molbio Diagnostics in Bengaluru, who developed and deployed at large-scale -- TrueNat, a novel point-of-care testing platform for Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) based medical diagnostics, iterated the need for strengthening the healthcare ecosystem to prevent further pandemics.
"The pandemic has shown us that future outbreaks are something we can anticipate. Viruses and other pathogens, fungus, for example, are all things that are showing up in the pandemic will be shown up beyond," he said.
"We saw the same thing in Nipah," he added "very early diagnosis and containment was able to contain Nipah. We have seen the same with other diseases of lesser prominence today but the basic thing we need to do as a community is to strengthen our ecosystem -- our grassroot healthcare has to be strengthened, our ability to diagnose closer to the patient, enable very quick decisions and contain diseases will help us eliminate future pandemics."
He said PCR as a technique fascinated him and the team to diagnose pathogens sensitively and specifically, and started looking at the problem more than 20 years ago. For it to be useful in India and other places, they set about creating a product that was easy to use, required minimal or no training or infrastructure. Distribution of it is in 40 countries today, and made an impact when India needed it most, he said.
Meanwhile, the Founder of Infosys, Nagavara Ramarao Narayana Murthy said "we don't need anything more than what the government has been saying all these months. If we take normal precautions, we can contain the new strain Omicron."
India has done a good job -- if we look at the number of people we have lost due to COVID, or the number of cases compared to the total population, its a much smaller percentage compared to most other nations, of course, no one knows about China, he said, adding, we need to continue what we are doing with less complacence and more discipline.
Pratiksha Baxi who worked on courtroom ethnography for 18 months and illegal processes such as 'compromises' by rape survivors said, "Unfortunately, the judiciary is misogynistic because the law is embedded in society and women lawyers and judges have experienced sexual harassment within the judiciary."
"We require a lot more work in the judiciary to end the problem of sexism and harassment because we can't think of law as separate from society" she added.
'Data Protection Law needed for research'
Senapathy Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founder of Infosys stressed the need for data protection laws and said it will help make data available in a reliable format that is useful for research. "Typically the data available for research is anonymized and population-level data," he said.
Awardees:
1) Engineering and Computer Science -- Chandrasekhar Nair, for development and large-scale deployment of new point-of-care testing platform for PCR based medical diagnostics
2) Humanities -- Angela Barreto Xavier, for analysis of conversion and violence in the Portuguese empire in India, especially Goa
3) Life Sciences -- Mahesh Sankaran, for work on ecology of tropical Savannah ecosystems, and contributions to sustaining the biodiversity of important Indian ecosystems such as Western Ghats.
4) Mathematical Sciences -- Neeraj Kayal, for work on complexity theory which provides mathematical tools to understand efficiency and limitations of algorithms.
5) Physical Sciences -- Bedangadas Mohanty, for investigations of the nuclear force which will help understand nuclear force in detail, and can help better harness nuclear energy.
6) Social Sciences -- Pratiksha Baxi, for pioneering work on sexual violence and jurisprudence that show gendered violence is reproduced by juridical practice