By: Vrushal Pendharkar Published in: *The Wire* Date: March 31, 2024 Source: https://thewire.in/the-sciences/remembering-veronica-rodrigues-birth-anniversary Please access the source for the entire article
"A peek into the life and studies of the passionate biologist who devoted her life to the practice and rigor of science" "In the mid 1970’s Siddiqi [Obaid Siddiqi, then faculty at the Molecular Biology Unit] started to get into neurobiology and was keen to look at systems of taste and smell. With her [Veronica Rodrigues] 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 <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02927976> for smell and taste. She described the cellular <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012160685710391> systems responsible for the sense of smell and identified the genes processing the sense of taste <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/01677069009107114> by using models of fruit flies. Rodrigues did this mostly through her students’ work but also through collaborations with her colleagues at TIFR. Rodrigues would have turned 71 today. D’Souza [Jacinta, Director of Centre for Excellence in Basic Science (CEBS), Mumbai] 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."
