Page 27 - CTB-1 10 May

PIONEERING A NEW FUTURE 27
MISSION
The advancement of science and diffusion of knowledge.
Unified Academic Campus of Bose Institute, Salt Lake
Bose Institute (1917)
Centenary Campus of Bose Institute, Kankurgachi
that Bose Institute physicists were invited to join international experimental collaborations at CERN and FAIR, where they have made their mark in a rather short time. Bose Institute continues to make remarkable contributions in the newly emerging fields of cosmo-climatology, cosmic ray – aerosol – climate interactions, and solar-terrestrial weather. All of these are considered to be science issues with tremendous overall societal impacts.
The pioneering work of JC Bose, performed at the interface of biology and physics, dominated biology research at Bose Institute for the first
20 years. This work was continued under the leadership of DM Bose. In addition, he also created
a number of new departments, including the first microbiology department in the country, making research more structured, where new antibiotics were investigated, including one called Bosemycin, named after the institute’s founder. Paper and column chromatography were indigenously developed and successfully applied to understand biochemistry of plants. The first natural carbazole alkaloid murrayanine was isolated from the stem bark of Murraya koenigii. One of the earliest
protein chemistry laboratories in the country was established, and a ‘moving boundary electrophoresis apparatus’ was built indigenously. The earliest work on milk proteins and lectins started in the country and there has been an emphasis given on applied research as well. The institute has collaborated on
a project for vegetative reproduction of cinchona trees in Kolkata and Darjeeling. Work on the effect of X-rays and gamma-rays on the production of new mutants of jute was also initiated.
MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Significant contributions during this phase stand out, especially by Gopal Chandra Bhattacharyya
and Dr Sambhu Nath De. Bhattacharyya conducted pioneering research on insect behaviour. Working on the effect of royal jelly on sex determination of ants, he convincingly showed that caste determination in the ants he was studying was nutrition-dependent, and while vitamins E and B1 (found in royal jelly) were necessary for sex determination, they were
not sufficient factors. The other achievement of Bhattacharyya is his work on the inhibitory effect