News

She is the niece of Nobel laureates C.V. Raman and Chandrashekhar. She chose medicine because she says the precedent in her family of mathematicians and physicists was too daunting to surpass. The winner of the Magsaysay Award in 2005, Dr V Shanta talks to The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24x7's Walk the Talk programme, about 53 years of work in cancer treatment.

I'm in Chennai, this week, in what you might describe as the corridors of compassion. With me today is Dr. V. Shanta, chairperson of the Adyar Cancer Institute. Congratulations, first of all, for your Magsaysay Award: one of the very few, I believe, to go to a doctor.

Read more.. (Indian Express, Aug 23, 2005)

When a police constable was brought to Indira Gandhi Hospital at Kavaratti in lonely Lakshadweep, his condition was critical. Resident doctors at the hospital logged on to the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences in Cochin. A live ECG transfer to the mainland showed the constable had had a massive cardiac arrest and needed immediate treatment.

Read more.... (Daily Pioneer , 22nd Aug)

Srikrishna Jaiswal doesn't resent his job as an autorickshaw driver anymore. Now he knows his eldest son Anupam (17) will never have to follow his career path.

Through his son, the 45-year-old who has been a driver on Patna's roads for more than 10 years, can live his dream of being an engineer. His son cleared the IIT entrance examination this year.

Read more... (Indian Express, Aug 19, 2005)

The road to the remote village of Kharonda winds around the gentle slopes of the Sahayadri hills in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. Most of the road is well-paved, a black ribbon wrapped around hills washed a brilliant green by the abundant rainfall this year. Along the way, other small hamlets peep out of the misty hillsides, their red-tiled roofs flashing in the sun. The people of Kharonda and the other villages have a lot invested in this road. Through the seasons, even during the fierce monsoons, they use it to send the mangoes, guavas, and cashews they grow into nearby towns and distant cities for sale. They've got a new commercial activity, too, selling grafts of their flourishing mango trees to other communities in Maharashtra and the neighboring state of Gujarat.

Read more.. (In BusinessWeek)

They call it the monkey incident. A couple of months ago, a handful of engineers at Sarnoff Corp.'s lab in Bangalore, India, were conference-calling with colleagues at the research-for-hire outfit's headquarters in Princeton, N.J. They were sitting around a table in a meeting room when they heard loud banging from behind an air conditioner cover on the wall. One of them lifted the cover, and a baby monkey leaped into the room and raced around underfoot.

Read More.. (in Business Week)

Imagine a cancer drug that can burrow into a tumor, seal the exits and detonate a lethal dose of anti-cancer toxins, all while leaving healthy cells unscathed.

MIT researchers have designed a nanoparticle to do just that.

The dual-chamber, double-acting, drug-packing "nanocell" proved effective and safe, with prolonged survival, against two distinct forms of cancers-melanoma and Lewis lung cancer-in mice.

The work will be reported in the July 28 issue of Nature, with an accompanying commentary.

Read more... (at MIT's News Site)

Using the ancient architectural secrets of Vedic design, you could possibly transform your house into a holistic home.

Len Oppenheim considers himself a skeptic. So the Wall Street trader can't say with any certainty whether his headaches came to an end simply because he and his wife, Dena, moved from the suburbs of San Francisco to a rural farmhouse near Fairfield, Iowa. Or if his health improved due to the fact that the house on 14 rolling acres was built following the architectural guidelines of an ancient Sanskrit text called Sthapatya Veda, which suggests there's a correlation between human harmony and the orientation, spatial, and material elements of one's home.

Read more.. (by William Kissel in American Way Magazine, Jul 15)