Satyajit Mayor
Director and Professor,
National Centre for Biological Science Director, Institute for Stem Cell Biology
and Regenerative Medicine (inStem),
Bangalore, IndiaAs a master’s student in Bombay, India, in 1984, Satyajit Mayor worked in an organic chemistry lab devising probes to study synthetic biomembranes. He wanted to apply to molecular biology PhD programs in the U.S., but knew little about American universities except for the names of some of the top engineering and computer science schools where his friends had applied. Mayor, now professor and director of the National Centre for Biological Science (NCBS) in Bangalore, India, happened to be reading Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis’s novel partly set at a medical research institute in New York City supposedly modeled in part on the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. “I looked up the school in the library and found that this was the place where Fritz Lipmann discovered coenzyme A and where many other famous scientists did important work,” says Mayor.
He wrote to the university’s graduate admissions office and, to his surprise, received a letter from the dean’s office asking him to interview with two Rockefeller researchers who were visiting New Delhi. “It was beyond my means to buy an airline ticket, so I replied that I could meet the researchers if I was sent the airfare, thinking that would be the end of our communication.” To his amazement, Mayor received an airline ticket to travel from Bombay to Dehli to meet Zanvil Cohn at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. “Cohn was extremely warm and kind and described New York City as a wonderful place, completely selling Rockefeller as a fantasy land for doing science,” says Mayor. “He said that I should plan ...
