Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Sanjay Sane

2017; Elsevier BV; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.cub.2016.11.054

1879-0445

Sanjay P. Sane,

Ecosystem dynamics and resilience

Sanjay Sane is an Associate Professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bangalore, India. He has a bachelor’s degree in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics from St. Stephen’s College in University of Delhi, and a Master’s degree in Physics from the University of Poona in Pune, India. His doctoral work at University of California, Berkeley in the laboratory of Michael Dickinson focused on the aerodynamics of insect flight, and his post-doctoral work with Tom Daniel at University of Washington investigated the role of antennal mechanosensors in the control and stability of insect flight. In addition to these topics, his laboratory at NCBS focuses on a diverse range of questions arising from the physics to physiology of sensory and motor processes that guide insect wing movements during flight. More recently, they have also begun investigating insect architecture and collective behaviour in termites. What turned you on to biology in the first place? Chance, circumstance and the ‘gossip test’! After high school, I opted for mathematics over biology, because I loved physics. I was fascinated by Einstein’s theories of Relativity, the thought experiments and logic. After completing my Master’s project on gravitational waves, I procured a fellowship to pursue a PhD in physics at any university in India, but began worrying that I would not get to work with any real data on gravitational waves within a reasonable timeframe. Many things had to click in place: multiple countries had to commit major resources for multiple years, and the low detection sensitivity at the time meant that only major cosmic events such as supernovae could be detected. What cruel irony for a scientist to depend on divine providence for a supernova! My astrophysics aspirations completely unravelled from there, and I spent a confused time trying to decide what to do if not astrophysics. Around that time, I read about the ‘gossip test’ in Francis Crick’s autobiography “What mad pursuit”. The gossip test enables you to determine where your real interests lie, based on what you are gossiping about the most. I realised that my gossip centred on how to generate vortices in fluids, localize them and find ways to draw energy from them. I chanced upon an article on insect flight, and it was clear that I needed to look no further. I tried to get my physics mentors interested in insect flight, but they were ill-equipped for experiments. Quite by chance, I ran into Vijay (K. VijayRaghavan) and Veronica Rodrigues from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) at a conference. They worked on fly genetics, so I asked them if they would let me loiter in their labs even though I was a complete novice to biology. Vijay indicated that he was in fact looking for a complete novice in biology to work on a rather improbable project! I spent the next year setting up a flight screen in his lab, scoring Drosophila mutants, learning fly genetics…and thoroughly enjoying biology, something encouraged further by my interactions with another faculty member, KS Krishnan, who too was a recovering physicist like me. What was it like to move from India to the US and learn biology? I was discussing a possible PhD with Charlie Ellington at Cambridge University, the premier place to study insect flight aerodynamics, but my stint in Vijay’s lab had me also hooked to neurobiology. Around that time, Vijay met Michael Dickinson, then a young assistant professor at University of Chicago, while they were both lecturing at Seattle. Vijay suggested to apply to Michael’s lab because he was “right up my alley”. I went through his profile, and was very excited about the range of topics in his lab. Michael urged me to apply, which left me thoroughly confused about whether to go to Cambridge or Chicago. In the end, I just asked Charlie for advice! Charlie wrote me an incredibly gracious email saying that, in my place, he would join Michael’s lab because he was tackling the problem from all angles. I joined University of Chicago and had a rough time initially trying to learn biology through coursework. Michael urged me to attend a six-week intensive course on Invertebrate Zoology at Friday Harbor labs. It was one of the best courses I ever attended as it gave me my first direct experience of animal diversity in its full glory. Meanwhile, our lab had moved to Berkeley, I got married, and we began working on the project of my dreams. Together with Fritz-Olaf Lehmann, we worked on the long-standing question of how insects generated sufficient forces to fly. Charlie’s lab had earlier nailed a key piece of that puzzle by demonstrating the presence of a leading edge vortex on the wings of mechanical flappers and insects. Our efforts centred mainly on the measurement of forces and their detailed mechanistic understanding using a mechanical flapper device, affectionately called ‘Robofly’, because it was clear that aerodynamics of flapping was fundamentally different to that with fixed wings. Michael’s lab at the time was more focused on neurobiology, with a smaller aerodynamics component. However, I always felt that Robofly was very much a neurobiologist’s device because its wings were equipped with force sensors at the base — something that Michael was keen to understand during his own doctoral work. We also developed ways to visualize flows around the wing using techniques such as Particle Image Velocimetry. So we had the full information on both forces and flows — and that gave us key insights into what made flapping different from fixed wing flight. The field as a whole just took off, and there were suddenly several labs in several countries working on these questions. By the end of my doctoral stint, I felt satisfied that we had rigorously explored these questions, and I was now gossiping about sensory neurobiology. I joined as a post-doc in Tom Daniel’s lab in University of Washington, where we studied the role of antennal mechanosensors in flight control, another change of field for me. But Tom had a background in fluid mechanics, so I felt completely at home in his lab. He gave me full freedom, and we explored the role of Johnston’s organs in flight control, together with graduate student Alexandre Dieudonné and collaborator Mark Willis. Around this time, a ten day stint at Panama with Robert Dudley got me hooked on insect migration and field research. My dozen odd years in the US were incredibly happy and intellectually fulfilling. Why did you decide to go back to India and how has it been? Initially, for personal reasons. My parents were keen that we move back, and my spouse Namrata and I hoped that our two boys would grow up to be close to their extended family. I had not considered that there were also strong professional reasons to return to India. I joined the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in late 2007 and quickly realised a few things. First, India is a tropical heaven for an insect biologist! Developing indigenous, ‘non-traditional’ study systems would allow me to take my research from my lab to the field. Although it made life tougher in the initial years, this decision has reaped rich dividends in the longer term. Second, India lacks a like-minded community in my field, in part because my research area is not easy to pigeonhole. Am I a neurobiologist, an evolutionary biologist, a biomechanist, or an eco-physiologist? Luckily, NCBS had an open culture of multi-disciplinarity and intellectual ferment, but a wider audience for such work is not easily forthcoming and one feels isolated. For example, I worry if my students will have a tough time finding jobs. Third, the student community here is fantastic — they’re enthusiastic, hungry to do good work, and fun-loving. I feared initially that no students would join my lab because middle-class India forced a conservative mind set. But as India has economically prospered, students seem more willing to try new and ‘cool’ things out of pure interest. And fourth, given the relative absence of my discipline (whatever that is) in the country, I could not afford the luxury of maintaining a small lab. I had to build capacity and help generate my own future colleagues. In all this, I am guided by an Urdu saying: “kisi ko muqammal jahan nahi milta” (nobody gets a readymade world). So I try not to complain about administrative load! Do you have a favourite science book? I really love reading and re-reading David Quammen’s Song of the Dodo, which gave me my first appreciation of biodiversity and biogeography, and also of good writing. I also like Niko Tinbergen’s Curious Naturalists, which introduced me to animal behaviour as an experimental science, and Valentino Braitenberg’s Vehicles. There are many more, but these spring to mind most readily. Of the scientific texts, I greatly admire Bullock and Horridge’s two-volumed Structure and Function in the Nervous System of Invertebrates, which inspired me to develop a research program with a strongly comparative flavour. On a lighter front, I make all my students read To Know a Fly by Vince Dethier. Do you feel pressure to do more applied science? Yes, I do feel the pressure even though I think that the term ‘applied science’ is most unfortunate, because it suggests that certain scientific topics are of no practical use. I feel that all science is applicable but our imagination limits us. So, the term ‘applied science’ really means ‘can it make money or products in the short term’, which does not seem too appealing to me. I have so far been able to conduct research on simple, ‘blue-skies’ questions without worrying too much about their application in a relatively unhindered manner. Do you think there is an increased need for scientists to market themselves and their science as ‘a brand’? I think it would be tragic if that were to happen. As it is, one is increasingly seeing the triumph of style over substance in many aspects of science — the choices of journals in which to publish is one example. The push to publish in ‘high-profile’ journals is a real shame — all the more so because we scientists are ourselves guilty of pushing this trend. A lot of research talks become exercises in self-advertisement. I find it distasteful and unappealing. What scientific question outside your field fascinates you? Outside of my field, I am fascinated by the biological basis of death. We study living animals, but find it so hard to precisely define or understand death. Why can some organisms remain alive after losing their limbs or even brain function, yet sometimes perfectly healthy animals spontaneously shut down? These questions are old, and yet remain unanswered. I am also fascinated by animal communication; I feel that social animals such as dolphins can communicate in a sophisticated language that we need to decode. To my mind, such a discovery could prove as profoundly important as finding alien life, because it would allow us to understand our fellow earthlings better, opening up a totally new dimension in biology. Do you believe there is a need for more communication between biological disciplines? Not just biological disciplines but all subjects are, in essence, multidisciplinary. The first text on mechanics by Galileo covered the topic of bone mechanics, for example. Leonardo da Vinci examined birds when building ornithopters — much like Erich von Holst 450 years later. We can easily connect the dots between Descartes and Sherrington. Animals care as little about boundaries between disciplines as they do about borders between countries. These are all human constructs. What do you think about post-publication peer review of papers? I think it is a good idea in principle, but in practice it could become an endless cycle of criticism and rebuttal, and fraught with the same sort of problems that one sees with comment sections in the social media. There is no clear definition of who a peer is or should be. It could be a well-trained colleague or it could be a proponent of intelligent design. Papers do get discussed and critiqued in journal clubs and over coffee conversations after they are published — that may not be a formal process, but it is livelier. Any strong views on social media and science? For the most part, I find social media a distraction and waste of time. It is full of opinions rather than facts, and a lot of bogus leads. There are of course exceptions, but finding good blogs is like looking for needles in a haystack. Of course, blogs can be powerful because they sometimes expose problems that peer reviews might miss. I do worry that the profusion of journals and blogs is serving to elevate the ‘noise’ and making it harder to find papers of substance. This makes even scientists prone to the ‘post-truth’ era. Which aspect of science would you wish the general public knew more about? I wish the general public knew just how much fun science is, and how wrong is the general view that science is the domain of a few eggheads who have learned a lot of facts. My specific field, in my own (biased) opinion, is fun because it allows me to operate seamlessly between my lab and the outdoors. It makes science that much more exciting to be able to see organisms in their natural context — in my case, insects flying to find food or mates, or guarding territories, or just going about their daily business. I crafted my entire research program around locally observed fauna for that very reason. I also wish that the general public recognised that science is imperfect — but that is what makes it so powerful. Wisdom, as Socrates recognised, is to know that you don’t know. Being a scientist has taught me that the more you find out, the more you discover about what you did not know. I love that process of generating new questions!