Sidharth, man with an eye to the cosmos, leaves BPSM; plans to continue research
By M Somasekhar| Updated: 29th April 2021 5:19 pm IST
M Somasekhar
The Birla Planetarium and the Science Museum are part of the tourist circuit of Hyderabad for decades. Perched on a hillock, right in the heart of the city, one can take a seat and go on a quick and exciting trip into outer space through the shows that run at the Planetarium.
The man, who led teams that transformed the ‘Naubat Pahad’ into a modern science complex, attracting hundreds of common people to a good number of Nobel laureates and scientists over the last 35 years is Dr B G Sidharth.
تكنولوجيا اليوم - البروفيسور صلحي الشحاتيت زميلًا فاعلًا للجمعية الملكية البريطانية للكيمياء bwabtk.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bwabtk.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
During an informal Zoom chat between Cambridge academics earlier this week, a question was put to an eminent scientist: “What do you think of the idea of giving an Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine followed by the Russian Sputnik?”
So far the conventional wisdom in the UK and in the west in general has been that that the first and second doses should come from the same vaccine. In other words, no mix-and-match. If someone has been given the Oxford vaccine as a first dose, the second should be the same. That would also apply to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
But the scientist, who seemed to know what he was talking about, took everyone by surprise with his enthusiastic endorsement of mix-and-match: “I think it’s a great idea.”
Hot on the heels of Vikram Seth’s
A Suitable Boy, the BBC is doing another big Indian story,
The Serpent, based on the life of the serial killer, Charles Sobhraj. It has announced that the eight-part TV drama, a co-production with Netflix, will begin on New Year’s Day. As with
The Crown, Netflix has probably taken “artistic licence” with the tale but there is much about Sobhraj still shrouded in mystery. Depending on who you believe, Sobhraj, born in Saigon on April 6, 1944 to a Sindhi father and a Vietnamese mother and brought up in Paris, murdered between 12 and 24 western hippies.