Manju Bansal
IISc, Bengaluru
Manju Bansal is INSA Senior Scientist and J C Bose National Fellow at IISc, Bengaluru. She received her PhD from IISc, under the guidance of Prof G N Ramachandran and joined the faculty of IISc in 1982. She is the Founder-Director of the Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology (IBAB), Bengaluru, and is serving on the Advisory Board of the World Wide Protein Data Bank. She has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at EMBL, Heidelberg and the Free University of Berlin, and a Senior Fulbright Fellow at UCSF, San Francisco. Her research is primarily focused on relating protein and DNA sequences to their structures and function by developing new concepts, computational algorithms, and tools, particularly in the area of DNA promoter architecture. She is a Fellow of all the three major science academies of India (FASc in 1998).
Session
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Francis Crick: A renaissance scientist
Francis Crick – molecular biologist, physicist, and neuroscientist – is most known as the co-discoverer of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953, along with his ideas of ‘central dogma’, and ‘wobble hypothesis’. While his early research was focused on revealing the genetic code, his later research at the Salk Institute, focussed on theoretical neurobiology and advancing the study of human consciousness. A true ‘renaissance scientist’ indeed. However, during the 1970s, some new discoveries questioned the assumptions he and Watson had made in their original theory of unidirectional genetic information transfer. Another of Crick’s ideas, viz ‘selfish DNA’, suggesting that nonsense sequences originated as DNA parasites and were eliminated by the host cell over time, is still to be proven. Nonetheless, Crick’s contributions towards assimilation of disparate ideas and experimental results from a wide range of disciplines, and to then propose new theories and suggest experiments are unparalleled in modern science. The talk will present a bird’s eye view of some of these ideas and the recent developments in these areas.