My father died in January of this year. This is the eulogy I read at his funeral, about a month ago.
Achintya Kumar Sinhababu was born in a tiny village called Kadakuli, in the Indian province of West Bengal. The name translates to “Muddy Road”, and the total population was probably under a hundred. Much of his family still lives there – we’re the only ones who live in America. They’re having a funeral for him there too now, with hundreds of people from surrounding villages in attendance.
Apart from knowing that he was born in the early 1950s, we aren’t sure about the date or even the year of his birth. Back in those days, people used to write down inaccurate birthdates to get extra rations from the government. But the modern world is full of forms that require you to claim a birthdate, so April 3 1951 is what he used.
If you met my father in the last few years, you probably knew him simply as a sweet old retired man, which is indeed who he was. But since you might not know as much about his journey from that poor village in India to being a top research scientist in America, that’s what I want to spend some time telling you about.
Those of us who are born in the US take it for granted that we’ll be able to go to high school. But many people on the village didn’t have any education beyond elementary school, and India was poor enough back then that high school had to be paid for privately. Fortunately, my dad had stellar test scores in junior high, and my grandfather used those scores to convince the headmaster of a boarding school some distance away to admit him for free.
Despite coming from a poorer background than many of his fellow students, Dad kept doing well academically and soon got a reputation as the smartest kid in the class. Only two meals a day were provided at the high school, and during hard times back home he had trouble getting enough money from the family for a third. But because of how well he was doing in class, wealthier students were happy to trade their food to him for tutoring.
In high school, Dad discovered chemistry, the focus of his work for the rest of his life. He told me a month before he died that the one thing he always had was that he understood the atom better than anyone else. And that’s how he achieved success in life – understanding chemistry from the atoms up.
He did well enough on the exams at the end of high school to win a scholarship to Presidency College – the most prestigious university in the state and one of the most prestigious in all of India. From there, he was accepted to do his Masters degree at IIT Kanpur, a top Indian science and engineering school. At the next level, American universities started to get interested. After sending out applications to places that didn’t insist on charging application fees, because he didn’t have the money to pay, he was invited to do a PhD at the University of Iowa.
Right before he went to Iowa, he married a girl from a village a short distance away. Mom’s mom had been going to the temple and praying that Dad would marry her daughter. Grandma was delighted, and it also turned out very well for my brother, my sister, and I that they got married.
So after setting up in Des Moines, Dad went home to bring his wife along with with him. It must have been bewildering for Mom – a girl from an Indian village, going straight into an Iowa winter. She had to learn her English in America. We don't really have any pictures from back then, because Mom and Dad didn’t have enough money for a camera.
In 1980, Dad got his PhD and was offered a postdoc at the University of Kansas. He would finally have enough money to start a family, so that’s when I come into existence. It’s also when there’s enough money to buy a camera, so we have more pictures starting around then. Robin is born in 1983.
Dad raised us with an immigrant’s sense of the amazing possibility ahead of us in America. To him, America was the land of opportunity, the place where he could rise to levels of success that weren’t really possible in India. He wanted us to work hard and succeed in the amazing new world ahead of us. He still tried to teach us some of the best things of the old country – we watched the 94-part Indian TV series of the Mahabharat, the great Indian epic. But the overall cultural direction was forward into America. We learned baseball, not cricket. Dad was a big fan of Westerns. He really liked High Noon and its iconic theme song.
When he wasn’t at home, Dad was off in the lab doing science. Since Dad being amazing at chemistry is what’s driving this whole story, I want to tell a little science story to help you understand that.
This is from when Dad was a postdoc, working in the lab at the University of Kansas, trying to answer the questions chemistry researchers are supposed to answer. He was researching a reaction that was important to industrial chemists, who were trying to set it up in factories to make a lot of some useful molecule. A problem they often run into is that their reactions only make a small amount of the molecule, and make a lot of waste. With the reaction Dad was researching, Kansas, an input molecule kept reacting with itself, leading to lots of waste products which happened to smell terrible.
Dad got the idea that the surface of silica gel had the right structure to hold the input molecule apart from other molecules of its kind when the reaction was started. Separated from each other, the input molecules woldn’t react with themselves. Then the reaction would proceed efficiently, without the bad-smelling waste products. I think he could just see this in his scientific imagination as he thought about the molecules. So he put some silica gel in when he did the reaction, and got very little waste. He published a paper on this in the September 1983 volume of the Journal of Organic Chemistry. The title is "Silica gel assisted reductive cyclization of alkoxy-2, .beta.-dinitrostyrenes to alkoxyindoles."
After the paper came out, he went to a conference where two chemists working in industry publicly thanked him for figuring out how to do a clean synthesis of the desired product. One expressed wonder that silica gel, of all things, was the way to make it work. If I understand how Dad figured that out, it’s basically a matter of understanding the atom, working your way up from there to how atoms come together form the surface of silica gel, and then understanding what that surface will do to affect a chemical reaction.
While the actual science was going well, Dad still wasn’t finding the job openings to become a professor like he’d always wanted. So in 1988, he and Mom took me and Robin to Raleigh, North Carolina, where Supriya would soon be born. That’s where he would start working in the pharmaceutical industry for Glaxo, which eventually became Glaxo Wellcome, which eventually became GlaxoSmithKline, which is now called GSK.
Once he got to industry, Dad’s career really took off. He turned his understanding of atoms and molecules to a new and important topic: Drug metabolism, or how to make sure pharmaceuticals do what they’re supposed to in your body. When you take some medicine, it has to be swallowed, survive the stomach acid, get absorbed in the intestine, not be toxic to something else in your body, and then actually do the thing it’s supposed to do. Shaping a molecule so that it could dodge all the stomach enzymes and get absorbed and not be toxic and do its job was the order of business. Dad started out working on that as a pharmaceutical chemist, and later in his career was hired to manage teams of scientists working on those issues for major pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
Those management responsibilities are what brought him from North Carolina to Philadelphia with GlaxoSmithKline, and Philadelphia to the San Francisco Bay area with Genentech. They brought him in to build new groups of scientists working on drug metabolism. And that’s what he did, hiring fast and building big teams of scientists.
After his work with Genentech was finished, Dad retired to Roseville, where many of you know him from. After five decades of hard work, he was finally free to relax. Nature and science were never far away – he’d spend the evenings watching YouTube videos about the animal kingdom and space exploration. I wish he could’ve had many more years of contented evenings like that – it would’ve been a fitting reward for decades of contributing to scientific knowledge. But I don’t think he felt he really needed a reward for that. Figuring out the answers is what a scientist wants to do, for its own sake, and that’s what he did.
Achintya Kumar Sinhababu was born in a tiny village called Kadakuli, in the Indian province of West Bengal. The name translates to “Muddy Road”, and the total population was probably under a hundred. Much of his family still lives there – we’re the only ones who live in America. They’re having a funeral for him there too now, with hundreds of people from surrounding villages in attendance.
Apart from knowing that he was born in the early 1950s, we aren’t sure about the date or even the year of his birth. Back in those days, people used to write down inaccurate birthdates to get extra rations from the government. But the modern world is full of forms that require you to claim a birthdate, so April 3 1951 is what he used.
If you met my father in the last few years, you probably knew him simply as a sweet old retired man, which is indeed who he was. But since you might not know as much about his journey from that poor village in India to being a top research scientist in America, that’s what I want to spend some time telling you about.
Those of us who are born in the US take it for granted that we’ll be able to go to high school. But many people on the village didn’t have any education beyond elementary school, and India was poor enough back then that high school had to be paid for privately. Fortunately, my dad had stellar test scores in junior high, and my grandfather used those scores to convince the headmaster of a boarding school some distance away to admit him for free.
Despite coming from a poorer background than many of his fellow students, Dad kept doing well academically and soon got a reputation as the smartest kid in the class. Only two meals a day were provided at the high school, and during hard times back home he had trouble getting enough money from the family for a third. But because of how well he was doing in class, wealthier students were happy to trade their food to him for tutoring.
In high school, Dad discovered chemistry, the focus of his work for the rest of his life. He told me a month before he died that the one thing he always had was that he understood the atom better than anyone else. And that’s how he achieved success in life – understanding chemistry from the atoms up.
He did well enough on the exams at the end of high school to win a scholarship to Presidency College – the most prestigious university in the state and one of the most prestigious in all of India. From there, he was accepted to do his Masters degree at IIT Kanpur, a top Indian science and engineering school. At the next level, American universities started to get interested. After sending out applications to places that didn’t insist on charging application fees, because he didn’t have the money to pay, he was invited to do a PhD at the University of Iowa.
Right before he went to Iowa, he married a girl from a village a short distance away. Mom’s mom had been going to the temple and praying that Dad would marry her daughter. Grandma was delighted, and it also turned out very well for my brother, my sister, and I that they got married.
So after setting up in Des Moines, Dad went home to bring his wife along with with him. It must have been bewildering for Mom – a girl from an Indian village, going straight into an Iowa winter. She had to learn her English in America. We don't really have any pictures from back then, because Mom and Dad didn’t have enough money for a camera.
In 1980, Dad got his PhD and was offered a postdoc at the University of Kansas. He would finally have enough money to start a family, so that’s when I come into existence. It’s also when there’s enough money to buy a camera, so we have more pictures starting around then. Robin is born in 1983.
Dad raised us with an immigrant’s sense of the amazing possibility ahead of us in America. To him, America was the land of opportunity, the place where he could rise to levels of success that weren’t really possible in India. He wanted us to work hard and succeed in the amazing new world ahead of us. He still tried to teach us some of the best things of the old country – we watched the 94-part Indian TV series of the Mahabharat, the great Indian epic. But the overall cultural direction was forward into America. We learned baseball, not cricket. Dad was a big fan of Westerns. He really liked High Noon and its iconic theme song.
When he wasn’t at home, Dad was off in the lab doing science. Since Dad being amazing at chemistry is what’s driving this whole story, I want to tell a little science story to help you understand that.
This is from when Dad was a postdoc, working in the lab at the University of Kansas, trying to answer the questions chemistry researchers are supposed to answer. He was researching a reaction that was important to industrial chemists, who were trying to set it up in factories to make a lot of some useful molecule. A problem they often run into is that their reactions only make a small amount of the molecule, and make a lot of waste. With the reaction Dad was researching, Kansas, an input molecule kept reacting with itself, leading to lots of waste products which happened to smell terrible.
Dad got the idea that the surface of silica gel had the right structure to hold the input molecule apart from other molecules of its kind when the reaction was started. Separated from each other, the input molecules woldn’t react with themselves. Then the reaction would proceed efficiently, without the bad-smelling waste products. I think he could just see this in his scientific imagination as he thought about the molecules. So he put some silica gel in when he did the reaction, and got very little waste. He published a paper on this in the September 1983 volume of the Journal of Organic Chemistry. The title is "Silica gel assisted reductive cyclization of alkoxy-2, .beta.-dinitrostyrenes to alkoxyindoles."
After the paper came out, he went to a conference where two chemists working in industry publicly thanked him for figuring out how to do a clean synthesis of the desired product. One expressed wonder that silica gel, of all things, was the way to make it work. If I understand how Dad figured that out, it’s basically a matter of understanding the atom, working your way up from there to how atoms come together form the surface of silica gel, and then understanding what that surface will do to affect a chemical reaction.
While the actual science was going well, Dad still wasn’t finding the job openings to become a professor like he’d always wanted. So in 1988, he and Mom took me and Robin to Raleigh, North Carolina, where Supriya would soon be born. That’s where he would start working in the pharmaceutical industry for Glaxo, which eventually became Glaxo Wellcome, which eventually became GlaxoSmithKline, which is now called GSK.
Once he got to industry, Dad’s career really took off. He turned his understanding of atoms and molecules to a new and important topic: Drug metabolism, or how to make sure pharmaceuticals do what they’re supposed to in your body. When you take some medicine, it has to be swallowed, survive the stomach acid, get absorbed in the intestine, not be toxic to something else in your body, and then actually do the thing it’s supposed to do. Shaping a molecule so that it could dodge all the stomach enzymes and get absorbed and not be toxic and do its job was the order of business. Dad started out working on that as a pharmaceutical chemist, and later in his career was hired to manage teams of scientists working on those issues for major pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
Those management responsibilities are what brought him from North Carolina to Philadelphia with GlaxoSmithKline, and Philadelphia to the San Francisco Bay area with Genentech. They brought him in to build new groups of scientists working on drug metabolism. And that’s what he did, hiring fast and building big teams of scientists.
After his work with Genentech was finished, Dad retired to Roseville, where many of you know him from. After five decades of hard work, he was finally free to relax. Nature and science were never far away – he’d spend the evenings watching YouTube videos about the animal kingdom and space exploration. I wish he could’ve had many more years of contented evenings like that – it would’ve been a fitting reward for decades of contributing to scientific knowledge. But I don’t think he felt he really needed a reward for that. Figuring out the answers is what a scientist wants to do, for its own sake, and that’s what he did.
