Dec 27, 1999

J. Udgaonkar, 39 and P. Guptasarma, 33
Biochemists

PROTEIN PASHAS

They may be working in parallel but their lines are destined to merge, sooner or later. Because Jayant Udgaonkar and Purnananda Guptasarma are relentlessly chipping away at the secrets of the molecule. Their work is providing insight into how protein folding and aggregation take place. Research that could help combat Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis and mad cow disease. "Once you know how proteins fold, you can then get them to perform any function," says Guptasarma, currently at Chandigarh's Institute of Microbial Technology. In short, they are tinkering with the building blocks of life.

Knowing the intricacies of proteins means knowing how the human being works. "The way the amino acid sequence of a protein does the coding for its 3-D structure is one of the unsolved problems in modern biology," says Udgaonkar of Bangalore's National Centre for Biological Sciences, who in 1998 won a Rs 2.84 crore grant from the UK's Wellcome Foundation.

Guptasarma personifies the ideal scientist -- modest about achievements but dogged in his quest. "In science, humility is a virtue," he says philosophically. "Once you start believing your research as pathbreaking, you are dead." As a child he would sit up late and bug his father with questions. It's this streak of questioning that was to later shape Guptasarma. In 1998 he bagged the New Idea Fund from the CSIR for pursuing research on a crazy hypothesis he put forth on flipping the sequence of amino acids.

Naturally, Guptasarma and Udgaonkar would refrain from describing their work as spectacular. But the fact is they are manipulating life at the molecular level -- you could call it a step away from playing God.

-Stephen David and Ramesh Vinayak

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