Utpal Banerjee’s father, who was a government servant, wanted his son to become an IAS officer. Banerjee, however, found his calling in science and headed off to Silicon Valley, not to join the nascent IT revolution but to chase his dream of becoming a scientist. And he continued to refuse being pigeonholed — though he had graduate and postgraduate degrees in chemistry, he was daring enough to plunge into biology research and went on to emerge as a top molecular and developmental biologist.

From a small-time Indian bureaucrat’s son to one of the most celebrated researchers in the US, Banerjee’s is an inspiring story. Apart from his acclaimed research career at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) that won him many laurels, he is among 20 professors in the US chosen by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to creatively improve undergraduate science teaching. Banerjee, who is known for successfully involving undergraduate students in actual research, has been awarded a HHMI professorship for a record third time — each term runs for four years and has a grant of $ 1 million — since 2002.

The molecular biologist earned his bachelors degree from St Stephen’s College in New Delhi, a masters degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and went on to become a full professor at UCLA at the age of 37 in 1994. He studies fruit flies (drosophila) as a model to understand how signalling between cells controls cell differentiation. Such cell signalling studies have helped his group uncover the functions of many oncogenes, the genes that could potentially turn cancerous. For instance, the gene called Son of Sevenless (SoS) which activates another gene called Ras — mutations in which are responsible for 60 per cent of solid tumours in humans — was discovered in his lab during his early days in UCLA.

Banerjee has also been using fruit flies as model to unravel genes behind eye formation and blood cell formation and maintenance. Blood cells, for instance,are formed from a class of stem cells called pluripotent heamatopoietic stem cells. But a normal blood cell has a lifespan of only 3-4 days. So maintaining the levels of blood cells in the body is difficult without an ordered and tightly regulated process of self-renewal and differentiation of stem cells.

Utpal Banerjee

Working on fruit flies, Banerjee and his colleagues, including Lolitika Mandal, who joined the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Mohali as a faculty member after postdoctoral studies at his UCLA lab, recently discovered that striking the right balance between blood cells and stem cells (which would eventually become blood cells) requires a complex “talkback” mechanism and unravelled several proteins involved in this conversation.

“We are not studying fruit flies because we like them but because the fly has a simpler genetic system that helps us understand how similar systems work in higher organisms such as vertebrates,” Banerjee told KnowHow on a recent visit to India.

“The most important thing to remember is not to draw the one to one correlation. A drosophila wing and a chicken wing are both appendages that formed to help them take off. But there are some genes that had evolved before the separation between invertebrates and vertebrates. Studying simpler systems like that of the fruit fly or earthworm aids us in understanding these early genes and thereby understand the actual logic,” he says.

Banerjee is known for evolving innovative teaching methods. “His undergraduate classes are one of the most popular classes in UCLA. As a mentor, he is strict and ambitious. His expectation from his student is always tremendous. His thirst for scientific pursuit is hard to scale,” says Mandal.

Banerjee, who heads the department of molecular, cell and developmental biology in UCLA, thinks the Indian higher education system has a long way to go if it wants to catch up with the best but feels that the journey has begun well. “The model that India has chosen is just right and suitable for the country,” he says.

More than getting researchers unlimited resources, it should focus on the right kind of institutions that can attract new talent. Institutions where research and teaching go hand in hand are the right model for India. “The newly-established institutions like the IISERs and the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, are actually doing that,” he says.

Even an average university in the US or Europe maintains a very high standard. If the Indian education system has to improve, the standards of average Indian universities should go up considerably, he observes.

“I have had many postdoc students from India. It wasn’t that many of them didn’t want to come back to India. But there weren’t many opportunities in the past. This is now changing with new types of institutions,” Banerjee feels.

Young researchers who have gone abroad for higher studies will come back and populate the professoriate, helping India. “But the system will have to have patience. Give them at least half a generation before asking for results,” he argues.

Even a decade isn’t too much to ask for if it can give India a great education system.