Indian scientists who changed the world

India’s scientific history is often told through ancient achievements — zero, the decimal system, early astronomy. But modern Indian scientists have also changed the world, often working with limited resources and in the face of colonial prejudice. Here are ten whose work still matters.

C. V. Raman: light and a Nobel Prize

In 1928, working in Calcutta with simple equipment, C. V. Raman discovered that light changes colour slightly when it is scattered by molecules — the Raman effect. In 1930 he became the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in science. Raman spectroscopy is now used to identify substances in medicine, chemistry and even art restoration. India celebrates National Science Day on the anniversary of his discovery.

Srinivasa Ramanujan: the self-taught genius

A clerk in Madras with almost no formal training, Srinivasa Ramanujan filled notebooks with remarkable formulas and wrote to the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy, who brought him to England. In a short life he produced thousands of results in number theory and infinite series, many of which mathematicians are still working to prove.

Jagadish Chandra Bose and Satyendra Nath Bose

Jagadish Chandra Bose was a pioneer of radio and microwave research and showed that plants respond to stimuli, inventing the crescograph to measure their growth. A generation later, Satyendra Nath Bose sent Albert Einstein a paper on the statistics of light particles that led to Bose–Einstein statistics. Particles called bosons are named after him.

Meghnad Saha and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar: reading the stars

Meghnad Saha’s ionisation equation of 1920 allowed astronomers to work out the temperatures of stars from their spectra. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, C. V. Raman’s nephew, showed that stars above a certain mass cannot end as white dwarfs — the Chandrasekhar limit — and later shared the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Homi Bhabha: building institutions

Homi J. Bhabha was a talented physicist, but his greatest legacy was institutional. He founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and led India’s atomic energy programme, designing a long-term plan to use the country’s thorium reserves for nuclear power.

Har Gobind Khorana and Venki Ramakrishnan: the code of life

Har Gobind Khorana helped crack the genetic code — showing which sequences of DNA letters correspond to which amino acids — and shared the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Four decades later, Venki Ramakrishnan shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for revealing the structure of the ribosome, the machine that reads genetic instructions to build proteins.

M. S. Swaminathan: feeding a nation

In the 1960s India depended on food imports and faced the threat of famine. Agricultural scientist M. S. Swaminathan worked with Norman Borlaug to introduce high-yielding wheat varieties, leading the Green Revolution that made India self-sufficient in food grains. He won the first World Food Prize in 1987.

A shared lesson

These scientists came from very different backgrounds — a Madras clerk, a Bengali shopkeeper’s son, a Punjabi village boy. What unites them is persistence and a belief that world-class science could be done by Indians. Many also built institutions so that the next generation would not have to go abroad to do great work. Among the living, C. N. R. Rao continues that tradition of institution-building in materials chemistry.