Tamil Nadu - Madurai   

DRDO labs available for research and application

Staff Reporter

"Laser facility can also be used by hospitals"

MADURAI: The Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO) laboratories across the country will be made available for medical research and applications in the interest of requirements of armed forces.

"The DRDO will extend support in the form of engineering equipment for medical research. Many of our facilities can be used for medical applications," M. Natarajan, Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister, said here on Saturday.

He was speaking at the valedictory session of TIFAC-COREs Meet 2005 (Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council-Centre of Relevance and Excellence) held at Aravind Eye Hospital.

Dr. Natarajan said the country's premier defence research organisation would look into `societal needs' also and it had an exclusive bio-medical engineering society that pursued research work. He said life-sciences was an essential element of armed forces since most of them worked in difficult and different terrains and were subjected to vagaries of nature. Stating that DRDO scientists had been working on lasers, he said those facilities could also be used by hospitals/medical institutions for large-scale research.

The Principal Scientific Adviser to Government of India, R. Chidambaram, in his valedictory address, said that attracting young people to careers in sciences was one of the objectives and a recommendation was being made to the Government to implement steps that would put 16 lakh science graduates into further studies.

Major task

He said making right technology choices was a major task on hand for which "we need to have a technology foresight." P. Namperumalsamy, Vice-Chairman, Aravind Eye Care System, said diabetes had become an epidemic, and diabetic retinopathy that caused vision loss was a serious challenge to be addressed.

P. V. Indiresan, former Director, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, called for a better focus on life sciences and said centres of excellence should be brought together in research activity. Deepak Bhatnagar, Adviser, Mission REACH, and Lt. Gen. Yash Malhotra, member, TIFAC Governing Council, also spoke.

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