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At the Wheel of Research
Author: Anuradha Mascarenhas
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 176
Price: Rs 599
Did you know that when Soumya Swaminathan, director-general of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), was invited to join the leadership team at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva in 2017, she was so reluctant to leave her job that she told J P Nadda — Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare at the time — “Mujhe mat bhejiye (please do not send me)”? He asked her to take up the invitation as it was an honour for India.
She wanted to stay back in order to look after her mother, who had dementia, and support her children through their graduate and postgraduate education, but her father M S Swaminathan, known as the father of India’s Green Revolution, convinced her to go.
This is one of the numerous captivating anecdotes sprinkled throughout journalist Anuradha Mascarenhas’s book At the Wheel of Research, a well-researched and engaging biography of Dr Swaminathan who became the inaugural chief scientist at the WHO and served the global health agency during the Covid-19 pandemic. At first, she was taken aback that Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a former Ethiopian health and foreign affairs minister whom she had met at a World Tuberculosis Day event in Delhi, and the first director-general of WHO from Africa, wanted her to join in the capacity of a deputy director-general for programmes.
Dr Swaminathan’s “Why is he calling me?” response seems understandable when we learn from her foreword to the book that she is given to belittling her own achievements. When she was approached to open up about her life for this book, she was initially reluctant. “I did not believe that there was anything extraordinary or particularly exciting about my life. What would interest a reader? What aspects of my life journey would resonate, enlighten, entertain or inspire?” she notes. Thankfully, she was able to get past those inhibitions to enable this wonderfully detailed account of her professional life.
After an MBBS degree at the Armed Forces Medical College in Pune, and an MD in paediatrics from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, she pursued a postdoctoral medical fellowship in neonatology and paediatric pulmonology at the Children’s Hospital, Los Angeles, attached to the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. She became the director of the National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis in Chennai and the secretary of the Department of Health Research (Ministry of Health & Family Welfare). While the book focuses on her stint with the WHO, it also fills us in on her contribution to tuberculosis prevention, tribal health, and de-stigmatisation of HIV and AIDS.
Dr Swaminathan’s role as the chief scientist at WHO was created nine months before the Covid-19 outbreak.
It evolved to encompass “leadership coordination (internal and external), strategy, building consensus, firefighting, and being one of the main WHO communicators doing press conferences, interviews with… Indian and international media outlets,
being active on social media… and taking on tasks that needed multidisciplinary expertise.”
With this book, we get a glimpse of how challenging it was “to be in the hot seat” but she was able to rise to the occasion because of her expertise in the field of public health, having dealt with “the biomedical and social aspects of HIV, tuberculosis and infections like Zika, polio and cholera”. The author points out that India usually nominates officers from the Indian Administrative Service for posts in international organisations, and several candidates were being considered, but the WHO chief was adamant about getting Dr Swaminathan for the job.
Fortunately, this book does not portray her as a superwoman. It keeps things real. The world of global diplomacy was new to her, and she had to tread cautiously while addressing various stakeholders who were stubborn about the language to be used in important documents.
Like former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s memoir Resolved: Uniting Nations in A Divided World (2022), this biography shows us how power dynamics operate in international organisations. It recalls, for instance, the time when Dr Swaminathan was part of discussions on a treaty around “implementation of a framework for researchers to access genetic resources for biotechnology studies, vaccine development and other activities.”
There were competing interests. Developing countries were looking for assured access to benefits as part of the sharing agreements. Wealthier countries wanted to safeguard private industry and intellectual property rights and also get free access to data and genetic resources.
India desperately needs more such books about women in senior leadership roles not only to inspire girls who want to realise seemingly impossible dreams but also to prepare boys to respect the knowledge, skills and vision that their female colleagues bring to the workplace.
The reviewer is an independent journalist and educator based in Mumbai. He is @chintanwriting on Instagram and X
