A young Indian researcher who grew up studying by kerosene lamp has led the way in two promising discoveries: a key to metastasis, the insidious process by which cancer spreads, and a possible way to transform regular cells into stem cells. Carey Goldberg in The Boston Globe:
Sendurai Mani
On a visit to Bangalore in 1998, Robert Weinberg, one of America’s leading cancer researchers, met a voraciously curious young doctoral student from a South Indian village so remote that he grew up without phones or television, studying by kerosene lamp. He had no Western-style last name, only a first – Mani.
Mani’s parents, rice and peanut farmers, had never been to school at all. But Weinberg sensed such scientific promise in Mani, who was then at the Indian Institute of Science, that he invited him to join his prestigious Whitehead Institute laboratory in Cambridge.
Now, Weinberg says his lab has come up with possibly its most exciting discovery since it found the first cancer gene nearly three decades ago, and much of the credit goes to that young Indian researcher, Sendurai (the name of his village) Mani.
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