This Article First Appeared In Scroll On May 09,2017
GNR, who was up against Goliaths from the West, never got any credit for his contribution.
In Chennai, not far from the banks of river Adyar, there’s an auditorium in the heart of a national research centre that appears wholly unremarkable – except for its name, Triple Helix. This holds the key to a David and Goliath story from the rarified realms of research. The plot, set in the early 1950s, involves a puzzle in structural biology. The cast spans continents.
A young scientist in Madras, now Chennai, is pitted against celebrated researchers from labs at the University of Cambridge, the King’s College in London, and Caltech. This elite group of Goliaths included the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, and the proposer of the single helix structure of proteins.
The David in this story is Gopalasamdram Narayana Ramachandran, or simply, GNR.