Distinguished Talk Report on Biotechnology: Confluence of Science and Engineering

The Resource person of the talk was Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan  Dr.Govindarajan Padmanabhan, former Director of the Indian Institute of Science, and presently serves as honorary professor in the Department of biochemistry at IISc, Bangalore .

Dr. Govindarajan Padmanaban was brought up in a family of engineers. His belongs to Tanjore district of Tamil Nadu but had settled in Bangalore. After completing his schooling in Bangalore, he joined an Engineering College. However, he found engineering uninteresting, and he joined the Presidency College in Madras to complete a bachelor's degree in chemistry. He completed his masters in Soil Chemistry at Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi and Ph.D. in Biochemistry at the Indian Institute of science IISc, Bangalore in 1966.

He primarily worked in the transcriptional regulation of Eukaryotic genes in the liver. He was interested in elucidating the multifaceted role of heme in cellular processes. His group discovered the heme-biosynthetic pathway in the malarial parasite and showed it to be a drug target. He has also been interested in the area of vaccine development. His team was successful in showing the antimalarial property of Curcumin and its efficacy in combination therapy in 2004.

He has been awarded Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology in the year 1983, Padma Shri in the year 1991, Padma Bhushan in the year 2003, Elected Fellowship of the National Academy of Medical Sciences.

This interdisciplinary talk was organized for the benefit of Faculty Members, Research Scholars, UG and PG students in the domains of Electronics & Communication Engineering, Bio-Technology. Around 100 students from the School of ECE and Biotechnology attended the talk.

The talk focused on following key points:

1. What are the biological systems?
2. Genomic Sciences
3. Genome Revolution
4. Applications in Medicine.(Indian Scenario)
5. Biotechnology Research Assistance Council (BIRAC)
6. Interdiciplinary active collaboration between Engineers, Biologists and clincians has led to development of diagnostics and devices.
7. Vaccine products from India, Vaccines (challenges), Biopharmaceuticals (challenges)
8. Innovation and disruption of technologies
9. 3D printing or additive manufacturing
10. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
11. Big data analytics-India
12. Wearable Technologies-India
13. What are the parts of Engineering to make a machine?
14. What are the parts for Synthetic Biology?
15. Ethical issues, Gene Therapy, Stem Cell Therapy, Gene Editing, cancer cell network Synthetic Biology.