At any gathering, you could easily spot him by his colourful printed shirt or jacket. His tall stature, smiling face, and warm handshakes have put generations of students, researchers, and scientists at ease.
Since 1956, when he joined the founding faculty of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, he has never stopped working at the bench. Along the way, he developed the world’s first leprosy vaccine and a hormonal birth control vaccine, founded India’s first immunology institution, mentored hundreds of students, and continues his research work at a private R&D institution he established after retirement. That’s Gursaran Prasad Talwar, Pran to friends and colleagues, who turns 100 on October 2, today.
Gaining experience
Talwar had a troubled childhood. His mother passed away a week after delivering him in 1926, at her mother’s place in Hisar, then in undivided Punjab. His father, a science postgraduate from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (now Bengaluru), ran a small pharmacy and dispensary in Lahore, where he shifted after remarrying. After a few years of schooling at a madrasa in Hoshiarpur, his father admitted Talwar to the Central Model School in Lahore. His excellent performance in the matriculation exam got him into the Government College Lahore, where he did his BSc Honours and MSc (tech).
As part of the postgraduation course, Talwar came to work at a pharmaceutical manufacturing unit in the Kangra Valley in the summer of 1947 but was caught in the communal frenzy that followed the partition of Punjab. He somehow made it to Lahore only to find that his family had migrated to India. Thus he landed in Delhi in late 1947 and started looking for jobs.
At this time, European countries began offering scholarships for higher education to Indian students via the Government of India. Talwar applied, and he was shortlisted and given a choice. “I chose France. Their national echo ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ appealed to my leftist leanings,” Talwar recalled. He joined the fermentation laboratory of the Pasteur Institute, but soon shifted to the biochemistry wing. He completed his Docteur es Sciences degree in 1953. After two years of postdoctoral work in Germany and working in an industrial concern in Milan in Italy, Dr. Talwar returned to India in 1955. His idea was to gain necessary experience for starting a pharmaceutical or chemical business in India.
Great excitement
But life took a different turn as Dr. Talwar was selected to join the proposed biochemistry department of AIIMS as an associate professor in 1956. “In medical colleges, biochemistry was then a minor part of physiology. I tried against all odds and succeeded in making it an independent course with a separate compulsory paper,” Dr. Talwar said. Simultaneously, he established a research lab and began working on growth-promoting hormones like estradiol. He published papers on mechanisms that enable hormones to activate gene transcription and translation.
The 1960s were a period of great excitement in modern biology, with landmark discoveries being made. Pushpa Mitra Bhargava, then at the Regional Research Laboratory Hyderabad, teamed up with Dr. Talwar to form what came to be called the Guha Research Conference. Bhargava organised an international symposium on nucleic acids at the Regional Research Laboratory, Hyderabad, in January 1964, which several newly minted and future Nobel laureates, such as Francis Crick, Gerhard Schramm, Charles Heidelberger, Seymour Benzer, and Roger Monier, attended. The trio of Bhargava, Dr. Talwar, and Obaid Siddiqui themselves constituted the rising stars of modern biology in India.
In 1970, the World Health Organization (WHO) proposed to start a regional training centre in immunology and initiate research in leprosy at AIIMS. Dr. Talwar was hesitant since his work on hormones was going on satisfactorily. “Howard Goodman, who was leading the WHO team, said India had the largest burden of leprosy in the world and asked me bluntly: ‘Do you think Americans will come and solve this problem?’ I knew nothing about leprosy but then started studying why people get leprosy and found that it was their inability to react immunobiologically to some key antigens of M. leprae,” Dr. Talwar said.
This fundamental understanding eventually led to the first curative vaccine against leprosy. It was a long process but resulted in an effective vaccine that not only cured the disease but also healed the scars. It also has the ability to react with key antigens of M. tuberculosis. The mycobacterium used to make the vaccine was later sequenced and named MIP or Mycobacterium indicus pranii, combining Pran and ‘National Institute of Immunology’, or NII.
Founding NII
Another landmark contribution by Dr. Talwar was the birth control vaccine, which has undergone extensive human trials and has been found to be safe, but is still to go into commercial production. “I found that all available birth control methods like vasectomy and intra-uterine devices were not yielding desired results because of various reasons. I wanted to develop a vaccine which could prevent pregnancy without derangement of menstrual regularity and hormonal profiles. So the target molecule should have a key role in sustaining pregnancy,” Dr. Talwar explained as to why he chose human chorionic gonadotropin to develop the vaccine.
Dr. Talwar revealed that the idea of the NII emerged from a discussion with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In 1980, the Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund selected Dr. Talwar as a Nehru Fellow; during the fellowship, Indira Gandhi, who was the Fung’s chairperson, used to meet the Fellows to learn about their work. Dr. Talwar told her about the leprosy vaccine and also explained how childhood immunisation could save millions of lives. She asked Dr. Talwar if India had enough vaccines, and he said ‘no’. Ms. Gandhi told him to give him a one-page note in ten days on how India could develop new vaccines.
Dr. Talwar happened to travel to New York the next day for a scientific meeting. “While sipping champagne along with caviar, on the plane, I wrote a note and submitted it to her upon my return. It was this note that became the basis for founding NII just two years later, in 1983,” Dr. Talwar said.
After retiring from the NII and a stint with the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, New Delhi, Dr. Talwar founded the Talwar Research Foundation in 1999, where he continues to work with a small band of researchers on hormones, antigens, and antibodies. He says he has no regrets in life as he begins his second century.
Dinesh C. Sharma is a New Delhi-based journalist and author.
Published – October 02, 2026 10:30 am IST
