Kolkata: London's Natural History Museum (NHM) is eyeing ties with the zoology department of Calcutta University, which also has a 100-year-old museum on its Ballygunge Circular road campus.
Dr Allen Warren, who is one of the curators at the prestigious London museum, was in Kolkata for an 'informal' visit, to have a meeting with
CU
researchers and discussed possibilities of some form of exchange programmes between the two museums.
"I had attended an international conference on single-cell organisms in 2014, when the Zoological Society of India invited me for a lecture in Kolkata. During that trip, I had also visited this campus where I met many researchers, including associate professor Ena Ray Banerjee. The thought of collaborating came up during that visit," said Warren.
This time, however, the visit is personal. "My wife's father was born in Jhansi. She has a relative who turned 90, so we flew down to celebrate his birthday. So this is a mix of holiday and work. I can't speak on behalf of NHM, but the fact that our director too was recently in India is a hopeful sign. And if a tie-up is possible, Kolkata will have to be high on the priority list," Warren added.
NHM, according to the researcher, exists because of its vast collection and a lot of it has been collected from India.
"Over 15,000 Indian specimens have been digitized so far. My
guess
is we have half a million specimen from India. I am exploring opportunities and there is a lot of scope for working together. With modern techniques, we can retrieve DNA material from preserved specimens and it would be a big leap to conserve India's biodiversity. I wish this department and ZSI to work alongside NHM. Personally speaking, it would be wonderful to have a tie-up at an institutional level," Warren told TOI.
Explaining the need for DNA barcoding, warren gave an example: "Suppose there is a particular species going extinct and are being bred in captivity. In UK, a trial run was dumped as all
the animals
turned out to be hybrids. It wouldn't have been possible without DNA sequence from our collection."
Ray Banerjee is hopeful of a fruitful collaboration as well. "I hosted his lectures at BITM, Indian museum and Science City together with three full fledged curricular discourse for post graduate students of the zoology department. We discussed use of ciliate anaerobes in waste water management in Kolkata and tracing the origin and pathway of zoological specimens presently housed at our museum. I hope that this visit will open avenues for educational, academic, scientific and socio-cultural exchange programmes and collaborative networking among the museums of the world with active participation from
the National
Council of Science Museums," said Ray Banerjee
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