Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jul 18, 2006
Online edition of India's National Newspaper Tuesday, Jul 18, 2006 |
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Tamil Nadu
Ramya Kannan
Subhashini Nagarajan
CHENNAI: Subhashini Nagarajan has proved how far you can go by being ecologically wise. For this chemistry Ph.D. student of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, U.S., green has delivered. Subha, who grew up in Chennai and studied in Ethiraj College, won a grant of $75,000 from the United States Environment Protection Agency (EPA) for a project to develop a non-toxic component of green tea that can fight cancer. Dr. Ferdinando Bruno, a U.S. Army scientist, put her on the green tea trail. Subha and her team came up with a process that uses natural enzymes to stitch together the relevant components of green tea to develop `polycatechins,' seen to be selectively effective against cancer. Working under the guidance of Jayant Kumar, director, Center for Advanced Materials (CAM), the team developed these new polycatechins using a single-step, cost-effective process. The project caught the fancy of the EPA, which initially granted Subha and her team $10,000 for qualifying to compete for the P3: People, Prosperity and the Planet Student Design Competition for Sustainability. Subha's potential weapon against cancer, it turned out, once again came up tops and won the $75,000 grant. In the rather well endowed CAM laboratory, chemists are working alongside physicists and biologists to take the product to the animal-trial stage. Subha, 26, says she got to go to the U.S. only because her brother, Ram Nagarajan, was already living there. "My parents did not believe in sending a girl to live in the U.S. all alone. It helped that my brother was at hand to guide me on the project."
After completing her Ph.D. next year, she hopes to have some training in an industrial setting before she comes back home to work or perhaps teach.
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