The Science Department of the French Embassy and the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, recently conducted a three-day seminar to show­case the growing part women scientists are taking in research. The Centre Franco-Indien pour la Promotion de la Recherche Ava­n­cée (Cefipra), an Indo-French centre for the promotion of advanced research, funded the project with support from the Indian Academy Panel for Women in Science. Cefipra is a collaboration supported by the Department of Science and Technology, government of India, and the French ministry of foreign affairs. It selects joint projects, provides financial grants and helps Indian and French scientists to travel and work in the two countries. It works along with the attachés scientifiques at the different centres of the French Embassy in Indian cities to administer and continue a cooperation programme that has been in operation since the 1950s. The Indian Institute of Science, earlier known as the Tata Institute, is a premier 106-year-old research establishment that started work in 1911 and had Sir CV Raman as its first Indian director.

The objective of the seminar was to highlight the scientific contribution and achievements of women in collaborative research projects. It included plenary sessions addressed by women researchers from both countries, scientific presentations by women researchers from joint research projects and a poster session by you­ng researchers. The presentations pertained to the life sciences, including stem cell science, physics and cosmology, nanomaterials and material science, and mathematics. This apart, there was a panel discussion on the issues that arise in international collaboration and also the means of promoting the extent and quality and the recognition of the work of women researchers in the sciences.

Unlike usual conferences of specialists in a field, the participants at this meeting were from different subject areas. The presentati­ons, hence, could not use specialist jargon nor assu­me that the audience knew the background or context of the research being des­cribed. All presenters had to explain their wo­rk at a basic level, often prefaced by a primer of the fundamentals of the field. This was rewarding for the audience and, as some presenters said, edu­cative for them as well. Here are a few of the presentations made.

Designing nanomaterials
Much of modern technology had been discovered th­rough the process of trial and error, said Shobhana Narasimhan from the Jawa­har­lal Nehru Centre for Ad­vanced Scientific Re­search, Bengaluru. The Bos­ch pro­cess for the manufacture of fertiliser, for ins­tance, is economical because it uses iron as an agent to speed up the reaction. But iron, as the correct trace element to use, was isolated after trying out 4,000 other materials! An alternative that is now available is to study different materials based on a drawing-board analysis of their crystal structures and the use of computers in place of actual experiments, she said.

The method uses the atomic structure and atomic mass of individual elements and carries out calculations on how they would behave when they form materials. The methods of quantum mechanics are relevant at the atom-size scale involved and numerical methods, which are very good approximations arrived at by computers, are used to get answers to complex equations. The calculations consider the relative dimensions of the atoms and the electric charges and look for structures whose energy is the least, to make for stability. A computational method called density function theory has proved fruitful in this quest, Narasim­han said.

Gold, which was generally an “inert” element, was proving to be useful when used as a nanoparticle to facilitiate other reactions, she said. The use of density functional theory had helped create layers of gold atoms just one atom thick. In one example, iron and gold ato­ms, which normally do not form an alloy, for­med a two-dimensional “raft” when laid on a base of the metal ruthenium. In another example, the nature of gold nanoparticles deposited on a base of an oxide could be modified by adding trace impurities to the base so that the charges affecting the gold layer were changed. Such treatment then led to improving the capacity of gold particles to speed up other reactions.

Stars and galaxies
Chanda Jog of the IISc and “young resear­cher” Op­hélia Fabre from France, working in the Indian Insti­tute of Science Education and Research, Trivandrum, demystified the nature of research into the distant heavens. Jog outlined the interplay of stars, interstellar dust and dark matter, which we can make out from the observed profile and dynamics of galaxies. While stars and galaxies are mapped essentially th­ro­ugh observation with telescopes, optical, X-Ray or radio, their movement is detected by the shift of the known emission or absorption lines in the spectrum of light that comes from the distant bodies.
Jog explained that when observing the rotation of galaxies, a peculiar feature was that the outer extremes went round at the same rate as the interior parts. This was unlike other systems, like the Solar System, where the distant planets like Pluto moved much slower than the inner planets like Mercury, Venus or earth. This feature gets explained if we take it that there is other unseen matter which has mass and thus creates gravity in the form of a halo around the galaxy, and this is what is known as Dark Matter.

Fabre first explained the huge masses of galaxies and groups of galaxies and the scale of distances that are involved. The parasec, she explained, which was 3.26 light years, was in fact the distance at which a star would need to be if the angle of lines from the star to two points as far apart as the sun and the earth were to be one second, or 1/3,600 of a degree.The work that she was doing, Fabre explained, was to find models that agreed with the observation that there were plumes of magnetic fiel­ds within and between galaxies that extended, without breaking up, to distances that compared with the extent of the galaxies, of the order of millions of parasecs. Fabre&’s team considered an early part of the history of the universe, where space was filled with photons, electrons and protons, all in motion, but no atoms, as yet. As the electrons were much lighter than protons, it was the electrons that would mainly constitute any electric currents.

How freely such a current would flow was estimated, considering the effect of photons bouncing off the electrons and also the electric forces between electrons and protons, and it was found that the effect of the photons should dominate to create a magnetic field that was in keeping with what was seen. The successful model had to account for both the strength as well as the extent of the magnetic field, Fabre said.

Malnutrition on brain deve­lopment
Shyamala Mani of the IISc described resear­ch into the mechanism by which mal­­nutrition of pregnant mothers affected brain deve­lopment in the foetus. In controlled experiments conducted on a mouse model, the effect of iron deficiency in the mother&’s diet on the development of the foetus’ hippocampus, a part of the brain that controls spatial memory that is vital for learning and survival, was studied. It was found that iron deficiency led to heightened stress response and high levels of the steroid corticosterone, which also affected the rate of cell division. A function of the hippocampus is to slow down stress respon­se, but less neurons in the hippocampus, than­ks to high steroid levels, again failed to keep the steroid level down!

Mouse studies, using the radial arm maze, where learning ability is assayed, showed that pups of iron-deprived mothers had a low learning ability due to loss of working memory. As there is high pre-natal malnutrition in India, the study showed that taking remedial measures would have wide and long-lasting returns in terms of health and ability of the growing population. 

The writer can be contacted at simplescience@gmail.com