Mamannamana Vijayan- A Life among Men, Women and Molecules (Memoirs of an Indian Scientist)

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History of science is a fascinating study because it recognizes the institutions of the past, their ethos and the characters that helped the institutions to blossom through triumphs and tragedies. Memoirs of any discipline in science are of paramount importance because the lesson in history helps the present and the future to grow. The Indian National Science Academy aspires to nurture the theme of history of science through various approaches. As the fallout of such initiatives, biographies of eminent scientists of India are of great interest since they paint a landscape of the times represented, along with an account of the scientific endeavours of the scientist concerned.

The incentive to publish this memoir of Dr. Mamannamana Vijayan was to capture a period of a scientific journey, covering a great body of work on crystallography in the country. Prof. Vijayan's tenure as a student at the Allahabad University physics department, a department with a distinguished history once headed by stalwarts like Meghnad Saha and K.S. Krishnan and details of his stay at the Physics Department of the Indian Institute of Science, founded by Sir C.V. Raman will make interesting reading for students and teachers of crystallography. It is also a chronicle of the times of stalwarts like Satish Dhawan and R.S. Krishnan and an account of the efforts of various crystallographers who built an excellent group doing cutting edge research at the Indian Institute of Science. Prof. Vijayan had close association with Prof. G.N. Ramachandran, one of the most brilliant scientists of the 20th century doing pioneering work in the field of protein structure, when they were faculty colleagues at the Molecular Biophysics unit of the Institute founded by the latter. Prof. Vijayan interacted with him often and was surely influenced by this giant in science of the times.

The idea of writing the memoirs was first mooted years ago by my friend (late) N Seshagiri. The contributions of Seshagiri to the IT revolution of India, including in his capacity as the Founder Director General of the National Informatics Centre (NIC) New Delhi, are well known. He also had an abiding interest in Biophysics. He strongly felt that I should put on record the story of the initiation and development of macromolecular crystallography in India. I was too busy with my research and organisational responsibilities to undertake this task. I got some free time only when I was undergoing treatment in an Ayurvedic hospital in 2013. Then I realised that I have had an interesting past in Kerala during my early youth. I wrote about my life during that period till 1961, in Malayalam. I sent the manuscript to M.P. Parameswaran, an outstanding leader of Peoples' Science movement and a leading light of Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP) and to Kavumbai Balakrishnan who efficiently handles the publication activities of KSSP. They asked me to write my memoirs concerning the rest of my life as well. I was then not ready to do so. As a compromise, I included in the Malayalam memoirs, my life as a student at Allahabad University and the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and my experiences during the stint as a post-doctoral fellow in Dorothy Hodgkin's laboratory in Oxford. That brought the story up to 1971 when I started my independent research career. The book with a Foreword by the well-known historian Rajan Gurukkal was published by KSSP. It was released by M.A. Baby, former Minister of Education and Culture in the Government of Kerala, in 2016 at a function held in the premises of Kerala Sahitya Academy at Thrissur.

The idea of writing the full-length memoirs covering the whole of my life and career still germinated in my mind. In the meantime, my health was deteriorating on account of a neurodegenerative disorder a la Stephen Hawking.