Cancer to comics — Bengal researcher makes art out of science

From cancer to comics, from scientist to artist, from MIT to IIT — it has been an unusual journey for Bengal boy Argha Manna, who spent a chunk of his youth peering into the microscope but who later realised it was more fun spreading science through graphic art.

On Saturday (November 15, 2025), this trained biologist will be conducting a workshop in the city, History in Comic Art, teaching enthusiasts about the methods of researching, reimagining and crafting a visual story. “Art and science inspire each other and are very much connected. It was only in the 19th century that we separated them as disciplines. From the time of Leonardo da Vinci to William Turner, there was no boundary. Da Vinci himself was a brilliant scientist and engineer,” Mr. Manna, 38, told The Hindu.

“William Turner was a good friend of Michael Faraday, and many of his atmospheric watercolours were inspired by science (Turner and the Scientists by James Hamilton is one of my favourite reads). There are many examples in the history of humankind where the marriage between art and science has created new knowledge, which has pushed humanity to the next level,” he said.

This boy from Liluah near Howrah resident, joined the Bose Institute in Kolkata in 2009 as a research scholar on cancer biology, but dropped out of the programme in 2015 without accepting a degree. The reason? That year was the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, and the Science magazine had marked the occasion through comic art. “It was kind of an ‘Aha!’ moment for me. I thought if a serious scientific journal like Science could publish comic art, why couldn’t I do it? I had found my right calling,” the scientist-artist said.

“But this did not happen immediately. As I dropped out of the Bose Institute, I had to take a job to pay my bills. I took up a job in Ananda Bazar Patrika as a journalist. I didn’t have good skills in drawing, but there I learnt from the principal illustrator, Suman Chaudhury, who became my school. I did a double shift in the office for four years just to learn art. In the morning, I was a journalist; in the evening I learnt cartooning, illustration and techniques of fine art,” he said.

It was while working at the newspaper that he started creating comic art on the history of science. Recalling his fascination with microscopy, he tried to critically enquire, in the artwork, how microscopy, as a tool, started a revolution in in science.

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of his comic artworks, Be Aware of Droplets and Bubbles, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, generated interest in the scientific community and shortly after that, he earned a fellowship from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s when my artistic career began to take shape. I got a call from MIT and I started working with Prof. Lydia Bourouiba on the history of disease transmission, focusing on air-borne disease. I left the conventional way of publishing science and my project was asking critical questions and documenting paradigm shifts in disease transmission research through comics — graphic non-fiction,” Mr. Manna said.

By the end of 2022, a job offer from IIT Gandhinagar brought him back to India, but he has retained his association with MIT as well, returning there every summer to work on a book project. So, he holds twin designation at the moment: Artist-in-Residence (IIT Gandhinagar) and Research Affiliate (MIT).

“During my PhD days, I liked to see what was going on at the microscopic level. I never thought that my love for images would pull me towards art. I felt deeply that science nowadays is becoming deeply technical and that the philosophical part is being ignored. I wanted to express scientific knowledge, the development of science, and the history of science beyond academic settings,” Mr. Manna summed up his work. “I do not believe in unidirectional knowledge dissemination or monologue lectures. I am envisioning the workshop as a collaborative space in which we will have dialogues, ask critical questions, and draw stories together.”