The LVM3 launch vehicle successfully placed 36 satellites of the privately owned OneWeb consortium. However, you have recently indicated that the Chandrayaan-3 mission (to place a rover on the moon) will now likely only be in June 2023. Are commercial launches more important to ISRO than scientific missions?

The entire space sector is based on demand. When there is demand, I have to fulfil it. We have had only four science missions but have 53 satellites in orbit. The science component has always been very, very small. Science was never a priority but it must become the priority in the future. We’ve always had a very limited budget for science but we need more money so that we can do science missions. We are not doing enough in science but if we prioritise science, we will not get money.

The space policy, that will define the future of commercial space applications in India, has been on the anvil for a while. Is it expected soon and will it spell out the functions of New Space India Limited (NSIL). (NSIL is a public sector company and commercial arm of the ISRO).

The policy doesn’t talk about the structure of the organisation. Policy only spells out the intent and that is to have more non-governmental entities enter the space sector. The elements of this and how we can achieve this ‘intent’ is what the policy will spell out.

In the future, does ISRO aspire to be NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), in the sense more focussed on ambitious science missions?

NASA is the national space agency of the United States and decides that country’s space activities. ISRO is the national space agency of India but the way both operate could be different because the U.S. ecosystem already has a developed industry. In India, there is no industry capable of doing anything (space launches, satellite manufacturing) independently. Thus, ISRO’s role is to mentor and develop the industry ecosystem here. Once we get to that point, we could discuss the role of ISRO. Right now, I’m not interested in a comparison with another country. We have our own model.

The story so far: The Department of Biotechnology (DBT) recently said that the exercise to sequence 10,000 Indian human genomes and create a database under the Centre-backed Genome India Project is about two-thirds complete. About 7,000 Indian genomes have already been sequenced of which, 3,000 are available for public access by researchers. 

The proponents of the project say it would enable researchers anywhere in the world to learn about genetic variants unique to the Indian population. Countries including the United Kingdom, China, and the United States have launched similarprogrammes to sequence at least 1,00,000 of their population’s genomes. 

What is genome sequencing?

The human genome is the entire set of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)residing in the nucleus of every cell of each human body. It carries the complete genetic information responsible for the development and functioning of the organism. The DNA consists of a double-stranded molecule built up by four bases – adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). Every base on one strand pairs with a complementary base on the other strand (A with T and C with G) In all, the genome is made up of approximately 3.05 billion such base pairs. .

While the sequence or order of base pairs is identical in all humans, compared to that of a mouse or another species, there are differences in the genome of every human being that makes them unique. The process of deciphering the order of base pairs, to decode the genetic fingerprint of a human is called genome sequencing.

In 1990, a group of scientists began to work on determining the whole sequence of the human genome under the Human Genome Project. The first results of the complete human genome sequence were given in 2003. However, some percentage of repetitive parts were yet to be sequenced. The Human Genome Project released the latest version of the complete human genome in 2023, with a 0.3% error margin.

Costs of sequencing differ based on the methods employed or the accuracy expected. Since an initial rough draft of the human genome was made available, companies have aimed to reduce the cost of generating a fairly accurate “draft” of any individual genome— it has now fallen to a tenth, or to around $1,000 or less (approximately ₹70,000). 

Genomic sequencing has now evolved to a stage where large sequencers can process thousands of samples simultaneously. There are several approaches to genome sequencing — including whole genome sequencing or next generation sequencing — that have different advantages.

The process of whole-genome sequencing, made possible by the Human Genome Project, now facilitates the reading of a person’s individual genome to identify differences from the average human genome. These differences or mutations can tell us about each human’s susceptibility or future vulnerability to a disease, their reaction or sensitivity to a particular stimulus, and so on.

What are the applications of genome sequencing?

Genome sequencing has been used to evaluate rare disorders, preconditions for disorders, even cancer from the viewpoint of genetics, rather than as diseases of certain organs. Nearly 10,000 diseases — including cystic fibrosis and thalassemia — are known to be the result of a single gene malfunctioning.

In the past decade, it has also been used as a tool for prenatal screening, to investigate whether the foetus has sgenetic disorders or anomalies. The New York Times notes that the Nobel Prize-winning technology crispr, which relies on sequencing, may potentially allow ocientists to repair disease-causing mutations in human genomes. Aiquid biopsies, where a small amount of blood is examined for DNA markers, could help diagnose cancer long before symptoms appear. 

In public health, however, sequencing has been used to read the codes of viruses—one of its first practical usages was in 2014, when a group of scientists from M.I.T and Harvard sequenced samples of Ebola from infected African patients to show how genomic data of viruses could reveal hidden pathways of transmission, which might then be halted, thus slowing or even preventing the infection’s spread. Experts say that as sequencing gets cheaper, every human’s genome may feasibly be sequenced as part of routine health care in the future, to better understand personal molecular biology and health. 

At the population level as well, genomics has several benefits. Advanced analytics and AI could be applied to essential datasets created by collecting genomic profiles across the population, allowing to develop greater understanding of causative factors and potential treatments of diseases. This would be especially relevant for rare genetic diseases, which require large datasets to find statistically important correlations.

How did it help during the pandemic?

In January 2020, at the start of the pandemic,Chinese scientist Yong-Zhen Zhang, sequenced the genome of a novel pathogen causing infections in the city of Wuhan, a New York Times report states. Mr. Zhang then shared it with his virologist friend Edward Holmes in Australia, who published the genomic code online. It was after this that virologists, epidemiologists, and pharmaceutical firms began evaluating the sequence to try and understand how to combat the virus, track the mutating variants and their intensity and spread, and to come up with a vaccine. This information was also used to create diagnostic PCR machines.

To enable an effective COVID-19 pandemic response, researchers kept track of emerging variants and conducting further studies about their transmissibility, immune escape and potential to cause severe disease. Genomic sequencing became one of the first steps in this important process. Here, the purpose of genome sequencing was to understand the role of certain mutations in increasing the virus’s infectivity. Some mutations have also been linked to immune escape, or the virus’s ability to evade antibodies, and this has consequences for vaccines and vaccine makers.

Over the course of the pandemic, the United States and United Kingdom scaled up genomic sequencing, tracked emerging variants and used that evidence for timely actions.

India also put in place a sequencing framework, and the Indian SARS-COV-2 Genomics Consortia (INSACOG), a consortium of labs across the country, was tasked with scanning coronavirus samples from patients and flagging the presence of variants known to have spiked transmission internationally. The bulk of its effort was focussed on identifying international ‘variants of concern’ (VoC) marked out by the World Health Organization as being particularly infectious. Samples from international travellers who arrived in India and tested positive were sent to INSACOG for determining the genomic variant.

As of early December 2021, the INSACOG had sequenced about 1,00,000 samples. It was also tasked with checking whether certain combinations of mutations were becoming more widespread in India.

In the later stage of the pandemic, around December 2022, when over 90% of the adult population was already fully vaccinated and over one-fourth of adults boosted, sequencing helped in targeted efforts at ebbing infections. The Health Ministry urged States to ramp up sequencing (and not increase testing) to track new variants as the virus evolved by accumulating mutations. 

What is the significance of the Genome India project?

India’s 1.3 billion-strong population consists of over 4,600 population groups,many of which are endogamous. TThus, the Indian population harbours distinct variations, with disease-causing mutations often amplified within some of these groups. Findings from population-based or disease-based human genetics research from other populations of the world cannot be extrapolated to Indians, says a note from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). But despite being a large population with diverse ethnic groups, India lacks a comprehensive catalogue of genetic variations.

Creating a database of Indian genomes allows researchers to learn about genetic variants unique to India’s population groups and use that to customise drugs and therapies. About 20 institutions across India are involved in the project, with analysis and coordination done by the Centre for Brain Research at IISc, Bangalore. The Centre’s Department of Biotechnology notes that the project will help “unravel the genetic underpinnings of chronic diseases currently on the rise in India, (for) example, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative disorders, and cancer”.

Scientists from Centre for Cellular and Mole4cular Biology (CCMB) conducting tests at a dairy farm.
| Photo Credit: BY ARRANGEMENT

Millions of people around the world drink mineral water every day because their tap water is unsafe or because they prefer the taste. It’s packed with naturally occurring minerals that support bone and muscle health and governments and health organisations promote it as a clean, reliable source of hydration.

What is mineral water?

Mineral water is water that naturally contains dissolved minerals and trace elements. It comes from a protected underground reservoir, like a spring or aquifer, and has a specific composition of minerals. Unlike ordinary tap water, which treatment plants produce by filtering and purifying water drawn from rivers or groundwater, mineral water retains the natural minerals it has acquired from geological processes it has been a part of over years, decades or even centuries.

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As rainwater and snowmelt slowly percolate through layers of limestone, granite, sandstone or volcanic basalt, the minerals from the surrounding rocks dissolve in the water, and the differences in pressure underground push this enriched water back towards the surface, where it emerges as a spring or collects in a subterranean reservoir. Producers then drill wells or tap natural springs and flow the water into containers, using pumps if required.

How is mineral water regulated?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Parliament and the Council both have regulations that stipulate that mineral water must come from a geologically stable source, which producers must undertake to protect; that separate batches of the same water must have the same profile of minerals; and that producers must not chemically treat it to alter its mineral composition.

In India, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) and the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) stipulate that natural mineral water must come from underground sources such as natural springs and borewells, must be protected by various formations that ensure the water is free from pollution, and should ideally be collected in conditions that guarantee the original bacteriological and chemical composition.

As in the U.S. and the EU, the BIS standard IS 13428 requires the water’s TDS and the relative proportions of various minerals to be stable over time and across producers’ batches. Producers are also prohibited from treating the water to change its mineral composition, and instead are only allowed to filter or decant it, aerate it, and sterilise it. Chemical decontamination, such as by adding chlorine, is also disallowed.

Finally, unlike many food products in India, mineral water requires mandatory certification: to sell mineral water, producers must have both an FSSAI license and a BIS certificate and every bottle must carry the ISI mark (according to IS 13428). The FSSAI also requires the bottle to be labelled with the location and name of the source and the levels of various minerals, and disallows the packager from claiming the water has any medicinal or healing properties.

How is mineral water packaged?

To meet these strict criteria, producers usually bottle the water directly at or near the source. Once they extract the water, they filter it to remove particulate matter and elements such as iron to ensure the liquid is clear. Producers may also pass it through ultraviolet light for disinfection and adjust the level of dissolved carbon dioxide to produce still or sparkling variants.

Finally, the producers store the water in tanks and package it in glass bottles, PET bottles or aluminium cans at or near the source to avoid contamination or changes in composition. That said, the storage materials come with tradeoffs of their own. For instance, glass is chemically inert and doesn’t react with the water but it must be handled with care; PET is light but can leach small amounts of plastic over time, especially when it’s hot; and aluminium cans are most recyclable but require an internal plastic lining to prevent the metal from reacting with the water, which reintroduces concerns about chemical leaching and increases costs.

Packaged drinking water is not always the same as natural mineral water. Producers may start with tap or groundwater, purify it through reverse osmosis, then add back small amounts of minerals to improve taste. Similarly, spring water comes from a natural underground source but doesn’t need to meet the same strict standards for mineral consistency.

That said, under ‘bottled water’, the U.S. FDA encompasses Artesian water, mineral water, sparkling bottled water, spring water, and purified water (including distilled, deionised, and/or demineralised water or water that has undergone reverse osmosis). Artesian water is groundwater being pushed to the surface due to pressure created underground by impermeable rocks.

What effects do minerals have?

The minerals present in mineral water depend on its natural source. The most common minerals include calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, bicarbonates, sulphates, chlorides, silica, and sometimes fluorides or iron in trace amounts.

Calcium and magnesium make water ‘hard’ and give mineral water the mouthfeel people are familiar with and have come to expect, including a slight weight and body. Higher calcium levels render a smooth or slightly chalky sensation, while magnesium introduces a subtle bitterness. Similarly, bicarbonates neutralise acidity and give the water an almost sweet finish, sulphates — associated with magnesium-rich springs — add a slightly crisp taste, and sodium imparts a faint saline note.

Dissolved minerals also raise the water’s content of total dissolved solids (TDS) and change how it interacts with food, soap, pipes, and tissues, with different chemical and thermal environments (e.g. cooking), and with tissues in the human body. You may know from common experience that harder water deposits ‘scales’ in kettles and washing machines and doesn’t lather well with soap. Its inherent chemical properties also mean hard water supports bone density and aids muscle function, although the contribution of drinking water to these outcomes is generally much smaller compared to nutrition. Bicarbonates may improve digestion.

What are other forms of water?

When water is distilled, it means it is boiled into steam and condensed back to liquid, in the process leaving all dissolved solids, including minerals as well as contaminants, behind in the vessel. As a result the condensed water is nearly pure H2O, and tastes very different, almost hollow. It does not form scales on metal surfaces and behaves in the sort of predictable way that research laboratories and diagnostic labs prize.

However, while it is safe to drink, distilled water is not advised for regular human consumption because, aside from being devoid of minerals, it can also draw minerals out of surfaces it comes in contact with, including food and, potentially to a small degree, biological tissue.

Industries also treat water according to their needs. They may soften it to remove calcium and magnesium, deionise it to strip it of almost all dissolved ions or alter its chemistry to use in boilers or cooling systems. They could also demineralise it to prevent scaling and/or add compounds like sodium phosphate to lower its corrosion potential. Industrial water is neither safe nor suitable for human consumption.

To prepare municipal tap water, finally, treatment plants draw water from natural sources like rivers and groundwater, remove pathogens and chemical pollutants by filtering and chlorinating it, and add disinfectants such as chlorine. Unless a local authority specifically softens it, tap water retains its dissolved minerals. Its mineral content varies enormously by region: London’s tap water is noticeably hard because it comes from chalk aquifers while many Scandinavian cities supply naturally soft water low in minerals.

How is tap water ‘made’ in India?

The main source of water that eventually becomes tap water in India is rivers and deep borewells.

Because the pathogen loads are higher in tropical areas, municipalities subsequently disinfect it more aggressively than in temperate or cold regions like North America or Scandinavia. Among other steps, they add alum to make dirt clump together so that it filters out more easily, and add residual chlorine, meaning more chlorine than what is required to disinfect the water, so that water disinfected at first becomes reinfected later if, say, a leaky pipe exposes it to sewage.

In fact, such ‘mixing’ is so common that most Indian municipalities don’t guarantee potable tap water. Among the few exceptions are Puri in Odisha and parts of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu.

Tap water is a State responsibility while the Union government sets the standards. The IS 10500:2012 standard prescribes limits for the quantity of minerals in potable water but also has room for variations. For instance, while the TDS limit is 500 mg/l, it can go up to 2,000 mg/l if no alternative source is available.

Rajasthan, Gujarat, and parts of Delhi/NCR have very high mineral content, including calcium and magnesium, because their groundwater lies in aquifers rich in minerals, whereas cities and States drawing water from Himalayan rivers or areas with high rainfall, such as Mumbai and parts of Kerala, have much softer water with lower mineral levels.

Clarifying the influence of genetic factors that increase the risk of experiencing clinical anxiety may, in the future, help us to identify people who are particularly vulnerable |Image used for representational purpose only
| Photo Credit: DrAfter123

The yeast and filament form of Fungi

Tiling classification variables and sub-variables with examples

(This article forms a part of the Science for All newsletter that takes the jargon out of science and puts the fun in! Subscribe now!)

There is ample evidence that the big leaps science achieves from time to time are often built on scientists asking simple questions, driven solely by their curiosity and not because they wanted to develop a specific technology.

In a widely circulated piece in The New York Times, the journalist Katrina Miller wrote how one of the physics Nobel laureates this year, John Clarke, probably did not know how his work on macroscopic quantum tunnelling would lead to contemporary quantum computers. It goes somewhat similarly for the medicine and chemistry prize laureates as well. Ms. Miller goes on to cite the examples of Agnes Pockels, “whose fascination with the soap bubbles made while washing dishes laid the groundwork for the field of nanotechnology”, and “Isaac Newton, whose musings about an apple falling from a tree inspired a first theory of gravity, a bedrock that eventually took humans to space.”

Such examples also show that we can’t always know what applications will come up tomorrow by asking and answering some questions today. The deeper idea is that the more we know about the universe, the more we will know what to do with that knowledge.

But like all important matters today, there is at least another side to this coin (there are in fact several sides but let’s stick to just two here).

Science today is an integral part of society. It has got there quickly as well. Just in the last two centuries, but especially since the late 1800s, science has become much more organised, more specialised, and — importantly — more expensive. It was expensive in the 18th and 19th centuries, too, but it is even more so today. That it has become more organised is also important because that played an important part in quelling many superstitious beliefs and paving the way for scientific thinking while allowing scientists to make more and more intricate discoveries.

The scientific enterprise of the 21st century operates like an industry, with its own inputs and outputs, planning, budgeting, construction, recruiting and training labour, requiring policies and laws, and so on. While there are many laudable pockets of low-cost science, it is by and large a resource-intensive enterprise — and that means the countries that fund it need to think about where those resources will come from and how best to use them.

Now, there is a refrain in not-so-wealthy-but-still-quite-wealthy countries like India that there isn’t enough money to fund everything. Based on following science administration and public spending in India for over a decade, I think this claim is false: India has lots of money; what’s often lacking is the political will and the vision to fund specific enterprises over others.

But even after accounting for this argument, or perhaps because of it, many experts have said that there is a credible need for the scientific enterprise to thoroughly justify the way it spends public money. And this is the other side of the coin where curiosity-driven research presents a problem: it often cannot say what benefits it will yield in future, and developing and distributing those benefits often takes time (and more resources).

As a result, those experts have continued, there is a case to be made that India — with its vast appetite for technological solutions to improve working conditions and labour productivity in so many sectors — can’t afford curiosity-driven research alone and that it should provide special incentives for scientists and engineers to pursue research in particular areas. As any researcher will attest, this is also a long and difficult road, equally laden with the risk of dead-ends, but in many ways it’s one that administrators have had an easier time justifying and providing (some) funding for.

I’m a firm believer in the virtues of curiosity-driven research. Despite my difficult relationship with the Nobel Prizes, I’m often quite excited about the scientific work they reward. I’m particularly fond of the 2016 chemistry prize, “for the design and synthesis of molecular machines”, which involved a not insignificant amount of playful thinking. One of the laureates who shared this prize, J. Fraser Stoddart, had written in a 2005 essay:

His words illustrate the power of curiosity-driven research to change the world, even reshape it. It’s the same power a child wields when she asks questions like “do people in Antarctica stand upside down?” or, as a friend’s daughter recently asked me, “why does poop smell so bad?”.

Despite my own inclinations, I don’t think we can afford to ignore or dismiss the need for research that is more tailored to the needs of particular sectors. Both paradigms have their problems even as no country can afford to adopt just one or the other in its pursuit of technological development. For example, as the work of this year’s winners of the special Nobel Prize for economics says, every country needs to meet certain conditions for its scientific output to translate to technological wealth followed by economic growth. If these conditions are not met, simply increasing the scientific output won’t help; in fact it could become counterproductive.

So while it’s heartening to tout the virtues of doing science led only by the guiding light of curiosity, it’s important to remember that there’s a bigger world out there and that science is a part of it.

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