Nobel laureate visits Bose Institute museum

Nobel laureate chemist Prof Ada E Yonath today said she was privileged to see the instruments that were used by Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose at the Bose Institute museum.

Yonath who was here to address the 79th Acharya J C Bose Memorial Lecture visited the museum of the Institute founded by J C Bose in 1917.

"Thanks for showing me the very interesting museum," Yonath wrote in the visitors' book after taking a look around various galleries at the century-old building.

A spokesman of the museum said Yonath was shown some instruments such as photosynthetic bubbler, automatic recorder of root growth, Bose's self-designed apparatus to study responses in living and non-living, oscillating plate phytograph, response recorder, the compound lever crescograph and microwave apparatus.
 

She was also shown other memorabilia of J C Bose.

"I am privileged to be here," Yonath, who had received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A Steitz in 2009 for her studies on the structure and function of the ribosome said.

Yonath, associated with the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, delivered the lecture on 'Next Generation Environmental Friendly Antibiotics' on the concluding day of the 101st Foundation Day Celebration of the premier institute.

"Resistance to antibiotics is a severe problem in contemporary medicine and many antibiotics inhibit protein-biosynthesis by hampering the ribosome function," She said during her address.

Ribosome is a complex molecular machine found within all living cells.

She explained that long term use of antibiotics makes the bacteria resistant to antibiotics and "hence we have to choose pathogen-specific antibody".

A Pathogen is a tiny living organism, such as a bacterium or virus, that makes people sick.

Bose Institute Director Prof Siddhartha Roy said, the institute is moving to the forefront of futuristic research.

High energy and astrophysics are the two areas in which the institute is playing a lead in the international arena.

"In biology, we are planning to push ahead with several new cutting edge areas, such as synthetic and systems biology, human microbiota and its role in human health and ageing," Roy said.