At any gathering, you could easily spot him by his colourful printed shirt or jacket. His tall stature, smiling face, and warm handshakes have put generations of students, researchers, and scientists at ease.
Along the way, he developed the world’s first leprosy vaccine and a hormonal birth control vaccine, founded India’s first immunology institution, mentored hundreds of students, and continues his research work at a private R&D institution he established after retirement. At this time, European countries began offering scholarships for higher education to Indian students via the Government of India. Talwar applied, and he was shortlisted and given a choice. “I chose France. Their national echo ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ appealed to my leftist leanings,” Talwar recalled. He joined the fermentation laboratory of the Pasteur Institute, but soon shifted to the biochemistry wing. After two years of postdoctoral work in Germany and working in an industrial concern in Milan in Italy, Dr. His idea was to gain necessary experience for starting a pharmaceutical or chemical business in India. But life took a different turn as Dr. “In medical colleges, biochemistry was then a minor part of physiology. I tried against all odds and succeeded in making it an independent course with a separate compulsory paper,” Dr. Simultaneously, he established a research lab and began working on growth-promoting hormones like estradiol. He published papers on mechanisms that enable hormones to activate gene transcription and translation. The 1960s were a period of great excitement in modern biology, with landmark discoveries being made. Pushpa Mitra Bhargava, then at the Regional Research Laboratory Hyderabad, teamed up with Dr. Talwar to form what came to be called the Guha Research Conference. The trio of Bhargava, Dr. Talwar, and Obaid Siddiqui themselves constituted the rising stars of modern biology in India. Dr. Talwar was hesitant since his work on hormones was going on satisfactorily. I knew nothing about leprosy but then started studying why people get leprosy and found that it was their inability to react immunobiologically to some key antigens of M. leprae ,” Dr. Another landmark contribution by Dr. Talwar was the birth control vaccine, which has undergone extensive human trials and has been found to be safe, but is still to go into commercial production. I wanted to develop a vaccine which could prevent pregnancy without derangement of menstrual regularity and hormonal profiles. So the target molecule should have a key role in sustaining pregnancy,” Dr. Talwar explained as to why he chose human chorionic gonadotropin to develop the vaccine. After retiring from the NII and a stint with the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, New Delhi, Dr.
Because of various reasons, “I found that all available birth control methods like vasectomy and intra-uterine devices were not yielding desired results. Since 1956, when he joined the founding faculty of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, he has never stopped working at the bench. That’s Gursaran Prasad Talwar, Pran to friends and colleagues, who turns 100 on October 2, today. He completed his Docteur es Sciences degree in 1953. Talwar returned to India in 1955. Talwar was selected to join the proposed biochemistry department of AIIMS as an associate professor in 1956. Bhargava organised an international symposium on nucleic acids at the Regional Research Laboratory, Hyderabad, in January 1964, which several newly minted and future Nobel laureates, such as Francis Crick, Gerhard Schramm, Charles Heidelberger, Seymour Benzer, and Roger Monier, attended. In 1970, the World Health Organization (WHO) proposed to start a regional training centre in immunology and initiate research in leprosy at AIIMS. Talwar founded the Talwar Research Foundation in 1999, where he continues to work with a small band of researchers on hormones, antigens, and antibodies.
Talwar said. “Howard Goodman, who was leading the WHO team, said India had the largest burden of leprosy in the world and asked me bluntly: ‘Do you think Americans will come and solve this problem? He says he has no regrets in life as he begins his second century.
