From Shadow Warrior:

“Ask any scientist who acknowledges original research to give a list of Indians who should have got a Nobel Prize, and you will find the name G N Ramachandran (1922- 2001) there. Though trained as a physicist, Ramachandran’s greatest contributions were to biology, where he formulated the ‘Ramachandran plots’ which every biophysicist uses while studying proteins. His triplehelix structure of collagen is a classic discovery worth a Nobel.

“History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization’ says Ramachandran’s lesser known contribution was to three-dimensional image reconstruction , which redefined the way we look inside the human body without cutting it open. Some, like P M Bhargava, founder director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, believe Ramachandran should be considered the father of NMR and CT scan, though some others took credit for it. “Ramachandran was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society after some of us worked hard for it. He never asked for it,” says Bhargava . “He was neither elected as a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, nor nominated for a Nobel Prize which he richly deserved.”

Comment:

Western prizes, from the Booker to the Nobel, have strong political biases and are heavily slanted to Westerners themselves, or to others whose agendas align with Western interests.

Scores of great scientists who should have won the Nobel, have continued Indian’s ancient and medieval scientific tradition – one that is unknown to most in the West and regarded as some kind of feel-good myth.

Instead, it is the Western narrative of European supremacy in cultural achievement that is the feel-good myth.

European achievements are tremendous, but they aren’t as unique as current history tells us. Instead, they accompanied the achievements of others.

Then, because of European imperial conquests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in many cases they supplanted those others, sometimes, after appropriating them for their own.

When the real story of India’s scientific history is told, we are likely to find that the great medieval and early modern learning of India that was brought to the Western church via Catholic priests and missionaries over centuries, also fed the Renaissance and Enlightenment and scientific development thereafter.

It was not simply the Greeks.

But that is a story for another blog post.