14-yr-old boy wonder cracks IIT-JEE, tops in Delhi

Neha Pushkarna | TNN

New Delhi: The boy sat hunched, his eyes on the floor and his hands held in a twisted clasp below his knees, clearly uncomfortable with all the attention. On Wednesday, 14-year-old Sahal Kaushik had left everyone gasping in disbelief by not only becoming the youngest ever to crack the tough IIT-JEE test but also topping it in Delhi and notching an all-India rank of 33.

Sahal, tutored at home by his mother, Ruchi Kaushik, a doctorturned-homemaker, took a long pause before answering the barrage of questions—which IIT would he join? Would he study electronics engineering? He looked up: “I want to study pure science, physics or mathematics, not engineering.’’ He looked down again. “I took the JEE because I could also get science courses through it.’’

Sahal may look like any other budding teenager, but is clearly very special. He could spell long words when he was just two; he recited tables till 100 at the age of four; and by the time he was six, he had finished reading H G Wells’s Time Machine.

7 of Top 10 rankers are from Andhra
The IIT-JEE results, announced on Wednesday, threw up many firsts. The talk of the town is Madras zone beating Bombay with the highest number of candidates (32) in the top 100. Seven of the top 10 are from Andhra Pradesh. While only 22 students from the Bombay zone made it to the top 100, the zone produced the largest pool of qualifiers. Mumbai girl Aakanksha Sarda, at rank 18, is the all-India girl topper. But she has decided to skip the IITs and head to MIT.

SC qualifiers exceed quota, OBCs do badly
For the first time this year, IITs have decided to do away with the preparatory course for Scheduled Caste candidates, as more students have qualified than seats available. While 1,773 SC candidates qualified across the country, 1,426 seats are reserved for them across the 15 IITs. But candidates from Other Backward Classes registered a lacklustre performance and the engineering colleges will transfer 220 seats to the general category pool, which will now have about 5,000 seats.

CHILD PRODIGY: Sahal Kaushik is the youngest successful candidate ever in the IIT entrance exam. He was taught entirely by his mother till age 12

Did Venter create life? Not really, say experts

Amit Bhattacharya | TNN

New Delhi: Are the bacterial cells created in J Craig Venter’s laboratories in the US actually synthetic life? After the hype and hoopla over the announcement of the world’s first “manmade living cells”, scientists are getting down to answering that question. And this is what most of them have to say: Venter’s team has achieved a stupendous technical feat, but the cells cannot be called synthetic.

Using an analogy from everyday life, what the team did is akin to completely reprogramming a computer, but not building one from scratch. Here’s why.

As the first step in the decadelong work, Venter and his researchers mapped the genome of a simple bacteria, Mycoplasma mycoides. Genome is the ‘brain’ of any cell and contains sequences of DNA which carry all the genetic information needed for the cell — and by extension, the organism — to function.

Like all living matter, the genome is made of chemicals. What Venter’s team did next is being hailed as a tour de force. It manufactured the M mycoides’ genome, step by step in the lab, using, in Venter’s words, “four bottles of chemicals”. This synthetic genome, identical in every way to the ‘original’ except for certain harmless ‘signatures’ the team put in to mark it as a builtin-the-lab version, was then inserted into another type of bacteria after the bacteria’s own genome had been sucked out.

Venter describes what happened next: “As soon as the genome goes into the cell, it starts making new proteins encoded in its DNA and converts it into a new synthetic species. It’s a completely synthetic cell now, it has replicated over a billion times. The only DNA it has now is the synthetic one that we made.”

In other words, the once the synthetic M mycoides genome is introduced in the bacterial cell, it transforms into an M mycoides. When it replicates, the off-springs too are M mycoides, carrying copies of the man-made genome. Venter believes, for all practical purposes, this is synthetic life. But other experts are saying that though the cell’s control station is artificial, the cell itself isn’t. Neither is it a new form of life —the artificial genome is an exact replica of a M mycoides genome.

Says Delhi University Vice-Chancellor Deepak Pental, himself a biotechnologist, “In this case, the bacterial cell is being seen as a shell, an envelope into which man-made genome is inserted. But the shell is much more than an envelope.” Nobel-winning British biologist Paul Nurse elaborates the point. In an conversation with BBC, he says, “Venter’s work is a major advance. But it’s not a creation of synthetic life...Creation of synthetic life would be to make an entire bacterial cell through chemicals.”

Nurse, Venter’s rival, believes creating an entirely new cell from scratch, though theoretically possible, would require a level of technology likely to be reached “long after we are dead”. He points out that in Venter’s method, there’s very little scope of deviating from nature’s script. “In an earlier attempt, Venter’s team got just one genetic ‘letter’ wrong — out of a million — and this cell simply didn’t function,” he says.

THESE CELLS AREN’T SYNTHETIC

Craig Venter's team created the genome of an M mycoides bacteria in the lab and inserted it into another type of bacteria

The recipient bacteria started behaving like an M mycoides. Its offspring too carried copies of the man-made genome

Venter says the cells are synthetic since they are controlled by genes made in lab
Other experts say that for any cell to be called synthetic, all its components should’ve been created artificially — perhaps possible in theory, but as yet technically impossible

Schools grapple with norms

Right To Education Law Creates Confusion On Same-Neighbourhood, No-Screening Policies

Shreya Bhandary | TNN

Mumbai: Schools around the state are slowly gearing up to meet the various clauses as mentioned under the Right To Education (RTE) Act which came into force in April this year. However, some features of the Act, like banning screening tests and selecting ‘neighbourhood’ children, have created more confusion than clarity.

Clause 13 of the Act says no school shall subject any child or their parents to any screening procedure before giving them admission, but many principals still feel that screening of a student is necessary to an extent.

“These tests are performancebased, just to gauge the psychology of a student. Children are not expected to be brilliant at these tests. In fact, we don’t have any written tests for KG level students. Students who apply for admission to classes above standard I are tested on the three core subjects - languages (English and Hindi) and Maths,’’ said Meera Isaacs, principal of Cathedral and John Connon School in Fort. Some also felt that these tests are necessary to help the student understand and gel with the culture followed in the schools. “The tests are held to ensure that the student’s aptitude matches the school, so that later on the child doesn’t feel insecure while studying there,’’ said Avnita Bir, principal of Ramniranjan Podar High School, Santacruz.

Many added these tests are merely undertaken to understand a student and their parents before giving the child admission to the school. “For instance, parents should also be comfortable with the ICSE syllabus only then will the students find it easy too. We don’t want to promote tuition culture so we try to ensure that the student gets all the education in school and their homes itself,’’ said Carl Laurie, principal of Christ Church School, Byculla.

Others don’t agree. “The screening procedure should immediately be done away with so that there is no room for bias. Once the student is a part of the school, then he/she can be taught to gel in with the rest of the students and be taught other valuable information. Testing them on all this before they are even in the school is not done,’’ said psychologist Harish Shetty.

Regarding another RTE stipulation of giving preference to students from theneighbourhood only for admission,

Laurie said, “What exactly should we consider as our neighbourhood? For almost three kilometres, there isn’t any other ICSE school around so students come to us from a lot of places. We can’t deny them admission just because they stay a little away from school.’’ Many also mentioned that the lack of good schools in the city was another major problem. “Parents would obviously want to send their students to better schools and not bother about the neighbourhood,’’ added Isaacs.