Science and Technology Awards: Indian and Global

Awards in science and technology are asked in a settled pattern: the field an award belongs to, the body that gives it, the year it was instituted, the person after whom it is named and the age limit, if any, that it carries. Learning them in that order costs little and answers most questions. This chapter covers the Indian awards first, then the international ones, and closes with the Indian scientists who have won a Nobel Prize.

Indian awards in science and technology

The Bhatnagar Prize is named after Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, the chemist who became the first Director-General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and is called the father of research laboratories in India. Its seven disciplines are biological sciences, chemical sciences, earth, atmosphere, ocean and planetary sciences, engineering sciences, mathematical sciences, medical sciences and physical sciences. Because the prize is limited to scientists below forty-five, examiners often frame the question around that age.

The Nobel Prizes in science

The Nobel Prizes were created by the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist who invented dynamite, and they were first awarded in 1901, five years after his death. Three of them belong to science: physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine. The prizes in physics and chemistry are decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the prize in physiology or medicine by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute. The awards are presented on 10 December every year, the anniversary of Nobel's death, at Stockholm; only the Peace Prize is given at Oslo. There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, and the prize in economic sciences is not part of the original will but was instituted later in memory of Nobel by the central bank of Sweden.

International awards outside the Nobel

Two of these deserve a second look. The Fields Medal is the one to name when a paper asks for the highest honour in mathematics, because there is no Nobel Prize in the subject; it carries an age limit of forty, which is why the Abel Prize, open to mathematicians of any age and given every year, is treated as the closer parallel to a Nobel. The Kalinga Prize is worth remembering as the Indian contribution to the world of science awards, since the fund behind it came from Biju Patnaik, and it honours writing and broadcasting that brings science to ordinary readers rather than research itself.

Indian winners of the Nobel Prize in science

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for his work on the scattering of light and for the effect that carries his name, and he was the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in any of the sciences. He made the discovery on 28 February 1928, and India keeps that date as National Science Day. Har Gobind Khorana shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 for work on the genetic code, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar shared the Prize in Physics in 1983 for his study of the structure of stars, and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan shared the Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for the structure of the ribosome. Of these four, only Raman was an Indian citizen at the time of the award, the others having taken foreign citizenship, and this distinction is a common question. Ronald Ross, who won the Prize in Medicine in 1902 for showing how malaria is carried by the mosquito, was born at Almora in India but was a British officer.

Days and names linked with these awards

Three dates go with this chapter. National Science Day falls on 28 February, the day of Raman's discovery. National Technology Day falls on 11 May, marking the nuclear tests at Pokhran in 1998 and the test flight of the Hansa aircraft on the same day. National Mathematics Day falls on 22 December, the birthday of Srinivasa Ramanujan, whose name the SASTRA prize carries. Two names are worth keeping apart: Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, who built the chain of national laboratories, and Homi Jehangir Bhabha, who founded the atomic energy programme and after whom research institutions rather than a major annual prize are named.