Sambhu Nath de - Significance of Work

Significance of Work

But for Eugene Garfield’s 1986 tribute to De in Current Contents,6 De’s great contributions to cholera research would have continued to remain unknown to many even in India. A special issue of the journal Current Science (Bangalore, India) was published in 1990 in honour of De, to which several eminent scientists of national and international repute contributed.

In the words of Dr S Sriramachari, former director of the Institute of Pathology and additional director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research, New Delhi, De’s contributions stand out as a pinnacle of excellence in our understanding of the pathogenesis of cholera.

Nobel laureate Prof. Joshua Lederberg had nominated De for the Nobel Prize more than once. Said Lederberg, “our appreciation of De must then extend beyond the humanitarian consequences of his discovery. . . he is also an examplar and inspiration for a boldness of challenge to the established wisdom, a style of thought that should be more aggressively taught by example as well as precept.”

And yet De was never elected a fellow of any Indian academy and never received any major award. Indeed as Professor Padmanabhan Balaram pointed out in an editorial in Current Science, “De died in 1985 unhonoured and unsung in India’s scientific circles. That De received no major award in India during his lifetime and our Academies did not see it fit to elect him to their Fellowships must rank as one of the most glaring omissions of our time. De emerges, in retrospect, as a modest self-effacing scientist driven by inner compulsions to grapple with a major scientific problem of the time. His choice of cholera as his field of interest was remarkably appropriate to his setting. To this problem De brought a wonderfully thoughtful approach, together with deep intuition, enabling him to make the long-awaited breakthrough in the field. De’s heroic story of persistence, dedication and achievement should serve as an inspiration to the many who are increasingly bewildered by the current fashion of mega projects, surrounded by fanfare and publicity and most often surprisingly little discernible scientific output.”