As India turns 77, a look at nation's great minds who left indelible imprints

He shared the Nobel prize with two others for research that helped to show how the genetic components of the cell nucleus control the synthesis of proteins. His work gave us fundamental insights into the genetic code. His rise was meteoric. Born in 1922 in Raipur, a village in Punjab (now in Pakistan), he was the youngest of five children. Very few in his village were literate. But Khorana went to school and then to University of Punjab in Lahore. After his MS degree in 1945, he got a govt scholarship to the University of Leeds. Then after stints in Zurich, Cambridge, Vancouver, he wound up in the US, where he became a naturalised US citizen in 1966. (File photo)

She was born Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia, in 1910. She reached India in 1929 after spending a year in Ireland. Her first stop was Darjeeling where she began her novitiate, and then she moved to Calcutta, teaching at Loreto School. In 1946, during a train ride from Calcutta to Darjeeling, she experienced what she says was an “inner call” to serve the poor. And thus came up the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in 1950. Ever since she dedicated her life to the poor, the sick and the dying. She received the Nobel Prize for peace in 1979 and was canonised as Saint Teresa of Calcutta in 2016, 19 years after her death in 1997. (File photo)

His illustrious uncle CV Raman had made India proud by receiving the Nobel Prize in 1930, but Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, an Indian-American, was no less a star. He told the world how a massive star collapsed to become a black hole and determined what is known as the Chandrasekhar Limit. (File photo)

“I was interested in the lives of people who were very short of income and prosperity — how do they cope?” Amartya Sen had shared in an interview. His work on famines and his novel view that in order to accurately evaluate people’s well-being, economists needed to consider information beyond just income, have reshaped thinking in development and welfare economics. Known as the ‘capabilities approach’, the study of how policy affects a person’s life opportunities, an area of economics that’s grown in recent years, is based on ideas that Amartya developed. “… for his contribution to welfare economics and social choice theory and for his interest in the problems of society’s poorest members,” his Nobel citation in 1998 said. (File photo)

He ripped the ribosome open, literally. And, it became an important step in the production of antibiotics. In 2000, using a method known as x-ray crystallography, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and other researchers were able to collaborate to map the structure of ribosomes, made up of hundreds of thousands of atoms. A structural biologist, Ramakrishnan got the Nobel in chemistry along with Thomas A Steitz and Ada Yonath for research on structure and function of ribosomes. (File photo)

In 1998, Kailash Satyarthi conceived and led the Global March Against Child Labour, covering 80,000km across 103 countries to demand an international law on worst forms of child labour. This protest led the International Labour Organisation to adopt a convention protecting children against exploitation and hazardous work. He continued to campaign against child labour, establishing organisations like Bachpan Bachao Andolan, that saved more than 80,000 children from child labour, trafficking and slavery. (File photo)

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, 63, who earned his doctorate from Harvard, has taught at Harvard and Princeton before joining his current job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 2019 along with his partner Esther Duflo and Michael Kramer for their extension of the concept of randomized control trials – much used in the sciences -- to the fight against poverty. Banerjee and Duflo are co-founders of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), an organisation whose “mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence”. They try to do this by breaking up the problem of poverty into smaller issues that can be fixed by using field experiments to see what works best in the real world. Among the areas they have worked on is improving educational outcomes and child health.