The ‘Science Katta’ at Pune: catching them young

Maithili Jog
Faculty, Garware College
Pune

It’s Tuesday of any week. It is about five minutes to six in the evening at the Department of Biotechnology at Abasaheb Garware College in Pune. All the classes are over by now. Most students have dispersed calling it a day. Some linger around heading slowly for the last cup of coffee or glass of sugar cane juice of the day. A few sportsmen are still practicing volleyball at the college ground and will continue doing so till it gets dark. In another half an hour the campus would look quiet and deserted normally, but not on Tuesdays, and not in the Department of Biotechnology in particular.       
       
For a number of students doing their B. Sc. or M. Sc. in Garware College, also joined by a few small groups coming from other colleges, University departments, sometimes even colleges of engineering or medicine, Tuesday evening is a ‘katta’ evening. A ‘Katta’ in local language means a roadside platform to come together and chat. The science katta is a weekly event to churn up a variety of ideas in science in a very informal way. It’s not a lecture, not a journal club, not a panel discussion or focal theme discussion. The only word to describe it would be a ‘katta’. The katta has no constitution, no subscription or no membership. Anyone can walk in or walk out any time. The only condition is that a new entrant has to introduce himself and talk about his/her interests. The weekly sessions have no speaker, no chairperson, no agenda or no pre-decided theme for discussion. There is no age barrier to attend the katta, it is open to anyone interested in science and belonging to any discipline of science. When everyone gathers, an informal chat begins. It may begin with anyone’s curious observation, a question, some piece of exciting news or even a joke. But very soon it touches great conceptual heights often touching cutting edge science that undergrads are unlikely to hear on any other platform.      
       
The person central to this activity is Dr. Milind Watve, who worked as a teacher of Microbiology in Abasaheb Garware College until recently. He started the katta way back in 1993 with just 2-5 participants in a small room at his residence,      
     
intended only to stimulate thinking on some issues. Over the years, the number of participants increased. Katta shifted to the college, and became popular not only among the students of Abasaheb Garware College alone but also those from other colleges of the city. His unique ways of thinking and informal approaches to a variety of subjects discussed attracted me to join this group in 1997. Although a somewhat irregular participant, I enjoyed the informal and unauthoritative atmosphere, freedom of expression and an unusually wide span of subject areas. Here the discussions drifted easily from molecular genetics to human behavior, mechanics of a wheel to diffusion of innovation in a single day. I happened to do a Ph. D. with Milind but perhaps what a PhD alone would have failed to teach me was taught by the kattas that I attended.      
       
After completing a PhD from IISc, Bangalore, instead of following the trodden path of one or a few post docs and trying for faculty positions in research institutes, Milind took to undergraduate teaching. His research model was that of utilizing the real strength of undergrads, apart from their tireless enthusiasm. Risk tolerance was the key according to him. PhD is a big investment and neither the student nor the instructor can afford to fail. Therefore PhD projects need to be safe ones where there is some precedence, some established paths and a good chance of getting some results. Undergraduates are free from such constraints and they can start trying out novel and often crazy ideas. If they fail, they have nothing to lose and as a result, they can contribute more effectively to path breaking science.      
       
The katta begins and ends in a chat on Tuesdays, but its consequences are far reaching. Since a large number of ideas are churned up in the hour and half, some of them give rise to novel projects. Some students are triggered by one of the ideas and may decide to pursue it. This leads to serious projects or simply curiosity based explorations. Many of them fail or may be given up half way, but a few of them take a different turn and often end up in publishable research. The labs are made available to students, who do not hesitate to work round the clock if need be, enjoying all the way. Owing to limited resources and infrastructure often the choice of work is driven by what is doable. But even with the constraint much valuable science flows out, owing to the inherent creativity of the model. Students have to think and design their experiments and here some supervision and mentoring is continuously needed. Initially it was Milind alone doing it but later some young teachers joined in. I must name Neelesh Dahanukar and Ankur Patwardhan, me too trying to play a role. If any exciting results come they immediately come back to the katta platform. So although a small group of students work on a project the entire katta group is intellectually involved. Thus the benefits of every piece of work are shared by everyone and those who actually carry out the work get due credits, even become first authors of resulting papers. This has been happening so consistently over the years that it is much more than some freak papers published by undergrads. The katta system has evolved into full-fledged and matured model of doing research breeding unusually diverse and novel publications.

Take for example the first ever demonstration of ‘theory of mind’ in birds. A series of simple to do field experiments demonstrated a new phenomenon in bird behavior. The work by first and second year students became a landmark in cognitive ethology and made late Prof. Donald Griffin exclaim “how simple, why didn’t I think of this before!!” Equally simple and novel was the finding that flowers cheat pollinators by not keeping nectar in some of the flowers and that gregariously flowering plants can cheat more because they are less likely to be remembered individually by pollinators. These two examples are contrasted by the much more technical and mathematically intensive concept of evolution of cell division symmetry and aging in bacteria. This model was developed by three girls in second year of Bachelor’s degree in three weeks and published in PNAS at the end of the day. On an average over the last sixteen years there have been two to three published papers every year by undergraduates of the katta system, some of them being published in leading journals like The Lancet, PNAS, American Naturalist, Oecologia, Appl Env Microbiol to name a few. The three examples demonstrate how the katta culture could easily handle one theme from cognitive science, one from plant animal interaction and one from prokaryotic cell biology. In terms of tools and methods the three major areas of biology namely field biology, lab biology and computational biology were spanned equally easily. In the era of super-specializations today, no single lab handles such a wide diversity of research areas so fruitfully. I believe that only the uninhibited katta culture made this possible.       
       
       
The katta has helped students think beyond the framework that they have been conditioned to think in. The wide ranging discussions have excited and motivated many students and as a result a high proportion of katta members have chosen a research career in diverse areas ranging from molecular genetics to psycho-linguistics. Katta is also an example of how a little encouragement can trigger student creativity and how a little bit of mentoring can result into pioneering contributions to science. But in my view, the most important outcome of katta is showing a new path for young researchers. Getting into undergraduate teaching can be extremely fruitful for those young investigators who are willing to explore new avenues of research. No doubt that there are problems associated with conventional colleges, such as a paucity of resources and a culture of mediocrity. Milind feels that the advantages of working with undergraduates more than compensate these problems. I am certainly looking forward for more researchers adopting the undergraduate research model and utilize the full potential of creativity of undergraduates.      
       

Milind Watve Publications that Emerged from the “Katta”

(All publications are available at www.milindwatve.com)
     
       

1. Mankar Manasee, Joshi RS, Belsare PV, Jog MM and Watve MG (2008) Obesity as a perceived social signal. PLoS one 3, e3187. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.00
[ Download PDF ]

2. Watve M. G. and Mandani S. (2008) Why serum chemokine levels are raised in insulin resistance syndrome: an immune reversal hypothesis. Curr Sci 95, 171-174.
[ Download PDF ]

3. Watve, Milind, Parab Sweta, Jogdand Prajakta and Keni Sarita (2006) Aging may be a conditional strategic choice and not an inevitable outcome for bacteria. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci, USA 103, 14831-14835.

news coverage by New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn10154

news coverage by The Economist http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=7963601)

4. Watve Milind, Champhekar, K., Rao, N., Sarma, K., Shah, B and Mahajani, K., (2004) Sex versus non-sex versus cheaters. Curr. Sci., 87, 95-99.
[ Download PDF ]
     

5. Thakar, Juilee, Kunte, Krushnamegh, Chauhan Anisha, Watve Aparna and Watve Milind. (2003). Nectarless flowers: Ecological correlates and evolutionary stability. Oecologia. 136: 565-570.

6. Watve, M., Saha, M., Bhide, V. and Jog, M. (2003) Taking care can be hazardous: Simulations show protecting a part of a population can increase disease incidence. Logical Biology 2003 (1): 4-15.

7. Watve, M., Thakar, J., Kale, A., Puntambekar, S., Shaikh, I. , Vaze, K., Jog, M. and Paranjape, S. (2002) Bee-eaters (Merops orientalis) respond to what a predator can see. Animal Cognition 5, 253-259.

8. Kale, A.U, Somedatta,C, Watve, M. G. (2002) Evolution of Mycobacterim leprae towards reduced virulence. Curr.Sci.83-9, 1078-1080.

9. Watve, M. G., Tickoo, R., Jog, M. M. and Bhole, B. D. (2001) How many antibiotics are produced by the genus Streptomyces? Arch. Microbiol., 176, 386-390. [ Download PDF ]

10. Smitha, B., Thakar, J. and Watve M. G. (1999) Do bee-eaters have theory of mind ? Curr. Sci., 76,574-577.

11. Sathe, A. A., Hinge, D. V. and Watve, M. G. (1998) Incidence of diarrhoeic diseases in families using traditional and commercial water purification systems. In: Proc. Natl. Symp. Frontiers in Appl. Environ. Microbiol., (Ed. I. S. Bright Singh) SES, CUSAT, Cochin . pp 196-199.

12. Watve, M. G. and Champhekar, K. (1997) An interactive neo-darwinian algorithm for musical creativity. In: Proc. of Third Int. Conf. on Cognitive Systems, Eds. J. R. Issac, Ritu Dangwal and C. Chakraborty, Vol. II, 861-870.

13. Matapurkar, A. K. and Watve, M. G. (1997) Altruist cheater dynamics in Dictyostelium: aggregated distribution leads to stable oscillations. American Naturalist, 150, 790-797.

14. Watve, M. G. and Gangal, R. M. (1996) Problems in measuring bacterial diversity and a possible solution. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 62, 4299-4301.

15. Watve, M. G. and Jog, M. M. (1997) Epidemic diseases and host clustering: an optimum cluster size ensures maximum survival. J. Theor. Biol., 184, 165-169.

16. Sathe, A. A., Hinge, D. V. and Watve, M. G. (1997) Water treatment and diarrhoeic diseases. The Lancet, 348, 335-336.

17. Watve, M. G., Palkar, A. S., Mehendale, S. S. and Deshpande, N. M. (1995) Cryptic genes: are directed mutations always beneficial ? Curr. Sci. 68, 1039-1043.

18. Watve, M. G., Sant, N. R. and Joshi V. (1994) Why Bonelli's eagles hunt in pair: A relative assessment of individual and paired hunting successes. J. Bom. Nat. Hist. Soc. 91, 355-359.

19. Watve M.G., Joshi, V., Sant, N.R. and Ranade S. (1989) Storage of food by Bonelli's eagle (Hieraaetus fasciatus). J. Bom. Nat. Hist. Soc. 86, 446-447.