Yathish Achar

Few scientific papers can match the enormity of James Watson and Francis Crick’s paper on the DNA double helix model, published in the journal Nature on 25 April 1953. This paper described the structural properties of DNA without dwelling much on its functional implications. They provided evidence for these ideas in their second paper, which appeared in the same journal just a month later, on 30 May 1953. This time, they moved beyond describing DNA’s structure to proposing how it copies,...

Most experiments fail. What defines a researcher is not avoiding failure, but staying long enough to understand it. On a sunny afternoon of June 28, 1968, in Berkeley, a scientist was setting up an experiment to understand why DNA rings isolated from bacterial cells were always negatively supercoiled. By the late 1960s, it was fairly well accepted that DNA in a living organism exists in three supercoiled forms: negatively supercoiled, positively supercoiled, and relaxed DNA. The major...

A PhD tests patience more than intelligence, offering neither comfort nor clarity along the way. But in the slow grind of failed experiments and small victories, the journey shapes someone who can carry uncertainty without breaking. In the end, what endures through the process matters far more than the destination - that is the quiet transformation a PhD leaves behind. Let me tell you a story I heard a long time ago. Up in the mountains there was a monk, famous for teaching meditation and...