Neuroscientist Mriganka Sur is deepening our understanding of how the brain works and the “mis-wiring” that causes mental disease
How is the brain wired? How does it code and decode information? What causes developmental disorders like autism and diseases like Alzheimer’s? These are the questions that have occupied neuroscientist Mriganka Sur over the past 30 years.
By studying the connections in the brain—and by making connections in the lab through an interdisciplinary approach—he has transformed not only his own work, but neuroscience as well.
It was in the late ’80s that Sur rose to fame when he ‘rewired’ the brain of a small animal, a ferret, at Yale University.
In that experiment he showed, for the first time, that the brain is ‘plastic’. He demonstrated how the brain changes in response to the external environment even as it continues to develop.
“That result was stunning; it beautifully combined physiology and behaviour and demonstrated his outstanding ability to hit the big questions without any fear,” says K. Vijayraghavan, director of the National Centre for Biological Sciences, who was Sur’s junior at IIT Kanpur.
After finishing at IIT, Sur moved to MIT; he wanted to combine technology and science.
At MIT, he ensured that other labs got interested in pursuing this goal. The result, in the 1990s, was the development of extensive toolkits that allowed researchers to image the brain at its barest: A single neuron.
(This story appears in the 02 March, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)