The Life, Times, Science and Context of Veronica Rodrigues

Right after Veronica Rodrigues landed at the airport in Mumbai in August 1976, she disappeared. She flew from Dublin, Ireland, where she had just completed her Masters. On the flight she met a few Irish nuns who invited Rodrigues to join them in Bombay. So she tagged along, leaving the researcher who’d come to receive Rodrigues stranded with a placard and clueless of her whereabouts. 

The researcher returned to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) – where Rodrigues joined as a doctoral student – and reported the no show to Obaid Siddiqui, then faculty at the Molecular Biology Unit, and whose lab Rodrigues was joining. This surprised the other students and left Siddiqi worried. Oblivious to everyone’s anxiety, Rodrigues turned up at the department after a 48 hour disappearing act. This in essence captures Rodrigues – she did her thing, followed her nose and explored where it took her.

The thing Rodrigues was brilliant at was science – the practice and rigour of science. Her entire life was centred around science and she lived for her research. Rodrigues’s quest to be involved in science made her write to Siddiqi after coming across a publication of his in a class discussion in Trinity College. In her letter she mentioned in no uncertain terms that she was likely to get a first or a high second class in her final Masters results and expressed her desire to research in microbiology. Rodrigues did pass with a first class and even provided two referees to vouch for her credibility. Siddiqi was suitably impressed and recommended drafting Rodrigues as a visiting member to TIFR. In his inimitable style he even informally sounded off Rodrigues of her high chance of admittance to TIFR even before an official decision was made. Such candour and, over the years, trust that Siddiqi and Rodriques came to build became the bedrock of a successful professional relationship that revolved around science between the two – Siddiqi, the mentor and Rodrigues, the protege. 

The protege didn’t need much encouragement or hand holding by the mentor. Rodrigues was focused, serious and organised with her research soon after she’d settled down after her eventful introduction to the new environment. In the mid 1970’s Siddiqi started to get into neurobiology and was keen to look at systems of taste and smell. With her prior training in genetics, Rodrigues quickly adapted to Siddiqi’s research ideas. Besides discussions with Siddiqi, Rodriques knew what she wanted to do. She took the lead to devise methods to carry out experiments and analyses. “Even when she was a student she had strong opinions and ideas and translated them in research experiments, she actually worked on the lines she thought about,” says Shobhona Sharma who was Rodrigues’s colleague and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, TIFR, from 2010 – 2018. “She started to get results quickly and Obaid and most faculty members were happy about it.”

Rodrigues obtained her Ph.D in 1981. Her doctoral work was the first pioneering work which led to the idea that taste and smell senses are controlled by genes and not by metabolic processes. This was, perhaps, her most seminal contribution to science. Such was the impact of her work that TIFR offered her a faculty position while she was yet to finish her doctoral work. After a brief postdoctoral stint at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany, Rodrigues returned to TIFR as a faculty member in 1985. 

That’s when Rodrigues started to explore and dig deeper into the science of mechanisms responsible for smell and come up with some great insights that were previously unknown. Hers was the first pioneering work propounding cellular basis for smell and taste. She described the cellular systems responsible for the sense of smell and identified the genes processing the sense of taste by using models of fruit flies. Rodrigues did this mostly through her students’ work but also through collaborations with her colleagues at TIFR. 

Krishanu Ray, Director, National Brain Research Centre, became Rodrigues’s first official student in 1989. He experienced a relationship where scientific ideas were exchanged at an equal footing with Rodrigues, his mentor. She allowed Ray to take the leading role and innovate to get results. Rodrigues was open to new ideas but had high expectations and strong criticism of her students’ work. “It was tough and stressful for me at that time,” remembers Ray. “But when I look back I realise it was the best training I could ever have had.” There was daily scrutiny of the work being carried out in her lab but this wasn’t without support and encouragement. She went out of her way to make resources available and provide the best possible training so that students could do competent work. Once when Ray ran out of  photo film before an experiment – his research involved taking photos of the specimens he prepared and analysing lineage (a series of populations or organisms descended from a common line of ancestors) from these – Rodrigues immediately took a taxi and bought him some. 

It wasn’t all plain sailing for Rodrigues’s students. There were bitter arguments and heated discussions not only with her students but other members of TIFR. Although tense exchanges were professional, they did strain relationships from-to-time. Rodrigues could be difficult and challenging to work with. However Gita Chadha, a feminist science sociologist and current Obaid Siddiqi Chair at the Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, who’s looking at Veronica Rodrigues through the feminist lens believes women in largely masculine spaces – as TIFR was during Rodrigues’s time – tend to become doubly masculinised in order to survive. While Chadha doesn’t take away the onus on individual scientists to counter toxic cultures around them, she argues that this burden does not lie with women alone. “The charge that they become ‘even more toxic than the men’ might be valid but needs to be understood as a structural malady and not as an individual failure,” she says. Rodrigues needs to be understood in this context. 

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Rodrigues also needs to be understood for the unquantifiable contributions she made to the careers of her students and to the scientific culture of TIFR. She was incharge of student affairs in the biology department and was responsible for seminar presentations. She was very particular about holding  student presentations on Fridays and is credited to have started the Journal club where recent scientific publications were discussed. Through such activities students learnt what scientific questions to ask and how to frame them in devising hypotheses of their research. They also learnt how to convert questions to experiments to actually carry out their lab work, while also drawing from each other’s ideas in an open but critical manner. These traits are integral to the development of scientific rigour of an institute. It, perhaps, isn’t a coincidence that many of Rodrigues’s students have gone on to make significant contributions to Indian science and head many research institutions. 

One of them is Jacinta D’Souza, Director of Centre for Excellence in Basic Science (CEBS), Mumbai. Although not a student of Rodrigues, D’Souza worked closely with her from the time she joined TIFR in 1985 till she left in 2009 to join CEBS to start her own first lab. D’Souza was nervous before making the switch. She sought Rodrigues’s counsel, as she often did. “‘Perfect! This is the way to go,’’ remembers D’Souza of what Rodrigues said to her. 

This was to be the last interaction D’Souza had with Rodrigues. A few months later, Rodrigues passed away on November 10, 2010 after having suffered from breast cancer. Rodrigues would have turned 71 today. D’Souza thinks of her often, as she did when she became the CEBS director in October 2023. It is for more than one reason we need to remember the life and work of Veronica Rodrigues.

Vrushal Pendharkar is an independent journalist covering the environment.