What it takes to stay in Science

We had the honour of hosting Professor Thomas Pucadyil, who is the director at the BRIC-National Centre for Cell Sciences, Pune. He was generous with his time and shared his insights on what it takes to be a scientist, the scientific journey, as well as his current projects. Scientific journeys are always serendipitous. When he was asked whether his student self would have believed he was the director of NCCS, he quite humourously answered that he didn’t know last year whether he’d be the director.

He says that success is a combination of perseverance and luck. There doesn’t need to be a grand plan; if you try to do your best at every stage, things often work out for you. He doesn’t believe that science is fundamentally different from any other field in terms of what is needed to succeed. One needs to be drawn towards science to excel. An aptitude to wade through decades of literature on decades of research and still produce something new is needed. Curiosity is something which can be developed by providing a budding scientist the correct environment. Every failure on the bench points us towards the success which forms our thesis or research publication. The successes wouldn’t come without the plethora of failures we face.

For Prof. Pucadyil, the temptation to quit and take a break comes up now and then. The most extreme version of this came during his time at The Scripps Research Institute. His work hadn’t gone as planned. He sat in his car and thought, “What am I doing here?” I think that’s a sentiment all of us in science can relate to. It is the hunt for the next discovery, the search to unravel nature’s beauty, which kept him in the game. Professor Pucadyil painted for us a picture of how academic careers work when you’re a principal investigator. You start with doing a lot of the lab work initially.

As your lab fills out with junior members, you learn to manage the team. The stage after this is all about mentorship and enabling lab members to be independent, since at this later stage, you’re busy with many other responsibilities. This is a glimpse into the academic world which students rarely get. We’re grateful that Professor Pucadyil enlightened us with this perspective. He now takes a scientific approach to more bureaucratic roles. He thinks that when bureaucracy works well, it enables science.

Currently, his lab is hard at work to solve the mysteries of membrane fission. Only four proteins are known to be involved in membrane fission. His lab has created a genetic knockout of all four proteins, yet membrane fission persists. This suggests that there are many more proteins involved in membrane fission. These proteins need to be discovered. His current directive is to exponentially populate the list of proteins involved in membrane fission. We’re all rooting for him to shed light on this mysterious yet beautiful secret of our cells. We invite you to enjoy the rest of the session here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWyOCMvVkAw

Written by,

Deven Matkari