GOVERNMENT TO FUND ANY INNOVATIVE PROJECT USEFUL TO MASSES
YOUNG
SCIENTISTS HAVE OBLIGATION TO SERVE THE SOCIETY - DR. JOSHI
The government
is prepared to fund and extend all support to any innovative project
be it of individual, a group or an organisation if it is found
to be useful to the masses or large sections of the society. In
such cases, funding will not be a problem at all, said Dr. Murli
Manohar Joshi, the Minister for Human Resource Development and
Science and Technology while inaugurating here today a Supercomputing
Facility for Bio-informatics and Computational Biology at the
IIT. It is a joint project of the Department of Biotechnology
and the IIT Delhi.
The government
has been providing all facilities both financial and infrastructural
to encourage research and development. But quality is lacking
at the highest level. What is needed is the motivation to innovate.
The country has done a lot for young researchers and scientists
and will continue to do so in the interest of R&D. They too
have an obligation to the society to help solve many a ill. This
is my message to the young innovative brains, said Dr. Joshi.
Turning
to the global biotech scenario, Dr. Joshi said that India’s immediate
priority should be to work for pushing the frontiers of science
and technology so as to bridge the gap between genome and drug.
This is highly important for controlling and eradicating several
diseases, especially malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, cancer, cholera
and AIDS which take a heavy toll. On this, bio-informatics has
a vital role to play. The first ever supercomputing facility in
the country for bio-informatics and computational biology, inaugurated
today, will help enhance India’s contributions to genome analysis,
protein folding and drug design, as also to the development of
novel scientific methods and new software tools for protein structure
prediction and active-site directed drug design. It will also
lead to the establishment of a national bio-computing grid to
promote Indian contribution to ‘in-silico drug discovery’ and
facilitate fundamental research in computational biology. The
in-silico methods are known to accelerate the pace of drug discovery
while keeping the costs low. India is among one of the first countries
to establish a nation-wide network of Distributed Information
Centres for Bio-informatics teaching and research. Hence, bio-informatics
has been identified as a thrust area in the 10th Plan.
India should be a world-class power in bio-informatics and computational
biology research and teaching within the next five years, Dr.
Joshi added.
The Minister
of State for Science and Technology Shri Bachi Singh Rawat released
on the occasion an alpha version of "Gene to Drug", software package.
The Secretary, Department of Biotechnology, Dr. Manju Sharma said
the biotechnology information system network has established a
link among scientists in organisations involved in research and
development activities in biotechnology. She said, the world-wide
genome sequencing efforts and advances in software applications
will soon grant us an opportunity to identify all proteins in
a cell and their spatial and temporal connections understood,
their functions established, their structure determined, so that
drug design could be undertaken in an automated way.
