Sikharam Prasanna Kumara Gupta, popularly known as S.P.K. Gupta, who passed away in New Delhi on January 29 at the age of 92, was a veteran journalist and biographer of scientists.
He began his journalism career as a staff correspondent with the news agency Press Trust of India (PTI) in 1952 in Madras and subsequently worked in Kurnool (which was the capital of Andhra Pradesh for some time), Mumbai, and New Delhi in various capacities. Gupta was posted as PTI correspondent in Moscow in the tumultuous period of the 1980s. Although he reported on politics, the government, and the courts most of the time, his editors didn’t mind if he used his spare time to write on science and medicine, about which he remained passionate until his passing.
If the name Yellapragada SubbaRow (1895-1948) resonates at all in the scientific circles and popular imagination of today, the credit goes entirely to Gupta. He not only wrote a well-researched biography of this pioneering medical scientist but did everything – from getting the government to release a postal stamp in SubbaRow’s honour to organising memorial lectures and exhibitions in universities – to keep the scientist’s memory alive.
Gupta turned to journalism after failing to secure a seat in a medical college. After graduating in science from Mysore University, Gupta did a diploma in journalism from the University of Madras. The interview board was puzzled that a science graduate wanted to pursue a course in journalism because science reporting in Indian news media was uncommon at the time.
While searching for themes on which to write popular science articles, Gupta came across one by American microbiologist and author Paul Henry de Kruif in the March 1947 issue of Reader’s Digest. It was entitled ‘The blood is the life’; one of its footnotes mentioned SubbaRow as someone who had synthesised folic acid. Another article by de Kruif in 1949 was about the discovery of an antibiotic, aureomycin, by SubbaRow at Lederle Laboratories, a facility operated by the American Cyanamid conglomerate.
A curious Gupta wanted to know more about SubbaRow and his work – but he could only find sketchy references and some obituaries in the American press. So he dashed off a letter to Lederle on the address printed on the label of one of its products. It was at Lederle that SubbaRow had spent some of his most productive years, developing tetracycline and other antibiotics as well as anti-filarial and anti-cancer drugs between 1940 and 1948 as its research director. Lederle sent Gupta some of SubbaRow’s papers and other biographical information.
For the next three decades, Gupta tried to piece together the SubbaRow story through correspondence, secondary research, and interviews. On the one hand, he traced SubbaRow’s family and friends in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, and on the other, he contacted his colleagues and research contemporaries at Harvard University, where SubbaRow did his PhD and was a research scientist, and Lederle, where he joined in 1940.
Gupta also visited Lederle, consulted the archival material and over the years conducted about 125 oral-history interviews. These included about 45 working and retired research scientists at Lederle. In this task, he was helped by Edgar Milford, the director of the archives at Lederle, until his retirement in 1965.
In India, Gupta interviewed all living members of the Yellapragada family, including SubbaRow’s mother, wife, father-in-law, and brother-in-law. Among the scientists, Gupta interviewed Sahib Singh Sokhey, the former director of Haffkine Institute. Sokhey had been SubbaRow’s senior in the biochemistry department at Harvard Medical School. SubbaRow sent aureomycin to Haffkine, where Sokhey was able to save nine out of 10 experimental animals suffering from septicaemia caused by the plague germ Pasteurella pestis using the drug.
Gupta finally published the SubbaRow biography, ‘In Quest of Panacea: Successes and Failures of Yellapragada SubbaRow’, in 1987.
Gupta was the first to highlight SubbaRow’s pioneering work on the development of chemotherapy, based on published scientific papers as well as unpublished notes. SubbaRow had synthesised aminopterin in his lab as an offshoot of his work on folic acid and supplied it to Sydney Farber and another doctor, Leo M. Meyer, for clinical tests among cancer patients. A note dated December 19, 1946, from SubbaRow’s lab discussed folic acid having a deleterious effect on leukaemia in animals, indicating that “the administration of an antagonist of folic acid to a patient, therefore, might inhibit leukopoiesis and cause a symptomatic improvement”. Aminopterin was the antifolate that SubbaRow’s team had synthesised. Farber received a consignment of aminopterin in November 1947.
However, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book ‘The Emperor of All Maladies’ described Sidney Farber as the “father of modern chemotherapy” who “accidentally discovered a powerful anti-cancer chemical in a vitamin analogue” called aminopterin. Gupta was shocked at this inconsistency because Mukherjee had met him at his residence in Delhi while researching for the book. Gupta had also given Mukherjee a copy of a picture of Robert Sandler, a child suffering from leukaemia who was the first one to benefit from chemotherapy administered by Farber. Gupta had found the picture in a news story that had appeared in the Boston Herald on April 9, 1948.
Another unsung scientist whose work Gupta brought to light is Kolachala Seeta Ramayya (1899-1977), who made fundamental contributions to the science of tribology while in America first and then in the Soviet Union. He developed different compositions of additives to improve the performance of motor oils, and his work gave an edge to the Soviet Union in World War II by keeping battle tanks manoeuvrable even under changing weather conditions.
Gupta deployed the same technique of tracing Ramayya’s family in India and the Soviet Union as well as his scientific achievements, and put together a biography that was published in 1997. His stint as the PTI correspondent in Moscow helped him meet family members and associates of Ramayya in the Soviet Union.
Ironically, while Gupta could collect enough research material to write full-length biographies of two unsung scientists, his efforts to write biographies of Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar and Homi Jehangir Bhabha did not come to fruition. In both cases, immediate family members did not cooperate.
Gupta covered the atomic energy programme in its nascent years in the 1950s and 1960s, so he decided to pen the life story of Bhabha soon after his untimely death in 1966. As part of this project, Gupta interviewed some 60 scientists, academicians, painters, and administrators. The list included M.G.K. Menon, Atma Ram, S. Bhagavantam, A.S. Rao, B.D. Nag Chaudhuri, Piara Singh Gill, B.P. Pal, Homi Sethna, N. Seshagiri, E.C.G. Sudarshan, M.R. Srinivasan, L.K. Jha, and V.K. Krishna Menon. All the interviews were conducted in the 1970s. Since Bhabha’s brother, J.J. Bhabha, did not cooperate, Gupta could not complete the biography.
As a last resort, he published the interviews in the form of a book in 2022. This was Gupta’s last contribution and provides valuable insights into an important era in Indian science.
Gupta’s contributions as a science journalist, editor, and biographer were immense, although he shunned the limelight. He belonged to an era of journalism when facts were indeed sacrosanct. He was of a rare breed of writers who maintained a lifelong obsession with their subjects and believed in thorough research and accessible storytelling.
Dinesh C. Sharma is a journalist and author based in New Delhi.
