PABITRA KUMAR MAITRA (1 November 1932 - 5 September 2007)
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PABITRA KUMAR MAITRA (1 November 1932 - 5 September 2007) Biog. Mew. Fell. INSA, New Delhi 35 201-226 (2009) PABITRA KUMAR MAITRA (1932-2007) Elected Fellow 1980 FAMILY BACKGROUND AND EARLY EDUCATION ABITRA KUMAR MAITRA was born on November 1,1932 in Majdia village in PNadia district of West Bengal. He was the fourth chld of mother Snehalata and father Sukurnar Chandra Maitra. Sukumar Chandra Maitra, a graduate, served in the Da rjeeling Himalyan Railway and was stationed in Kurseong. Pabitrats grand father, Amblka Charan Maitra, was an advocate, while lus uncle was a professor in Dajeeling Government College. His maternal uncle, Jyotirmoy Lahiri, was the principal of Ballygunj Government School at Calcutta and retired as the Assistant Director of Public Instructions of West Bengal, while the second maternal uncle, Karunamoy Lahiri was the professor of ophthalmology in the Calcutta Medical College. Maitra's elder brother, Sunil was a member of the West Bengal Civil Service and retired as a Secretary to the Government of West Bengal. His younger brother, Ashok has a master's degree in structural enpeering from the University of Minnesota and has retired from the National Thermal Power Corporation as its General Manager. He has three sisters. As a child Maitra went to a school in Kurseong, then moved over to Krishnanagar Anglo Vernacular School closer to his birth place, when he was seven years old, and studied there till his matriculation examination. Maitra's school days were not very pleasant. First, as Maitra had narrated during lus interview by Dr. Indira Chowdhury (Preferred citation: Maitra, PK Oral hstory interviews conducted by Indira Chowdhury, Kolkata and Bangalore, India, 2 April - 12 June 2003, TIFR Archive), "The school did not have a very glorious academic history. 1 will tell you why, because 1 appeared for the Matric examination in 1948 and my brother passed out in 1942 with a District Scholarship, with first division of course. In between for 6 years there was not even a single first division in the school." Then, in 1943, during the months of May to November, there was a very severe famine in Bengal, when an estimated three to four million people died of starvation. People fled from their villages to escape the famine, but no food was available in the towns either. People were dying on the streets (Ghosh, 1944). Maitra had described to Dr. Chowdhury, "I have many snapshots in my mind of that famine. I don't want to recollect those". Then in 1947 there was communal carnage in Calcutta and its repercussions spread to the neighbouring towns including Krishnanagar. Maitra recounted Chowdhury, "It doesn't matter whether anything happens or not. Fear i Biographical Memoirs causes all kinds of psychological trauma" and fourteen year old Maitra was the only male member in the house then. AnyGay, Maitra passed the matriculation examination in first division in 1948. Because of financial constraints, Maitra's parents planned to enroll him as an apprentice in the nearby Kanchrapara Railway Workshop. But as he reminisced to Dr. Chowdhury, Maitra said, "No, I want to go to college. So I kept on singing the same song. I want to go to college, without really knowing what college was like. But I thought that I would like to study a little bit more." His parents yielded and Maitra took admission to the Intermediate Science course in Krishnanagar Government College. The gold bangles of Maitra's mother had to be pawned to borrow money to pay admission fee. As Maitra had confessed to Dr. Chowdhury, "It hurt me inside immensely. Because I knew what gold meant to my mother. Because generally that's the capital exchanged when the next daughter is going to be married. So it was as if 1 was actually foreclosing one marriage or something. I felt guilty." "And then one day somebody told me that 'you have made it on the scholarship list.' See scholarship was not like these days. Scholarship was very rare, few, in fact very few. So I didn't expect anything. First thing I did was to tell my friend 'don't tell anybody in the house.' I went to the accounts office, 'when is money coming?' I just wanted to get the money because I wanted to release my mother's bangles." "Every day I used to go and the man would say, 'Arrey! You have come again, no go back, you don't come,' and one day they said, money has come." "So I went home with so much money 1 had never seen in my life." "See that's a joy, 1 could not share with anybody because I didn't want everybody to know." "That was my real moment of achievement actually. It made me feel very big. I was able to clear mother's ornaments without any help. This is the only story 1 had of my life (laughter)." Maitra did very well in the Intermediate Science examination, got a scholarship and came to Presidency College, Calcutta in 1952 to study BSc with Chemistry Honours. His favourite subject was Physics, but his elder brother advised him to stud) Chemistry in view of the financial uncertainty of the family and the presumed better chance of a chemistry graduate to get a job. As Maitra mentioned to Dr. Chowdhury, "Our future was totally undefined. We had no idea of the fact that I would go for M.Sc. and then a PhD. After that I will come to America and then to Tata Institute. The excellence of all the institutions that 1 was going to taste. I never had any inkling of that. So events happened and I floated along with these". It was in Presidency College that we met Maitra for the first time. As our friend, Asish Kumar Pain, a retired member of the West Bengal Civil Service has said, "Pabitra .. was short, fair in appearance with a strong jaw and a pair of bright eyes". Dr. Anadi .; Nath Chatterjee, formerly professor and head of the Department of Biotechnol Jadavpur University, Calcutta, remembers him as "the boy with golden voic was always sought after in our 'adda' sessions at CoUege Street Coffee H Pabitra Kurnar Maitra remember him as a very thorough student, but never a book worm, who did all the practical experiments neatly and seriously. After graduating from Presidency College, some of us, including Maitra, joined the Department of Applied Chemistry at the University College of Science and Technology, Calcutta and completed the three year MSc Tech course. Maitra's elder brother had supported him. Maitra had opted for Biochemistry as his special subject and had chosen vitamin 812 production by Streptomyces olivaceus as his research project. He then joined the laboratory of the late Professor Sailesh Chandra Roy in the same department for his PhD work on the metabolic processes in Streptomyces oliz~accus. Maitra's classical paper on 'Pathways of glucose dissimilation by Streptotrzyces olivaceus', which was published in The Journal of Biologcal Chemistry in 1959, comprised only a part of his PhD work. He stayed on with glucose dissimilation all his life. Maitra was a great help to the other students in the laboratory and exhibited even at that early stage considerable ability to guide research. He, in fact, was Professor Roy's trusted lieutenant. 1 remember, I had written a paper on my research work on mitochondria1 metabolic processes and had gven it to Professor Roy for correction. The next day Maitra came up to me with my manuscript to ask for some clarification, Professor Roy has asked Maitra to do the preliminary checlung. As long as Maitra was around, this was the routine. Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, now Distinguished University Professor of the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago recalls, "I first met Professor Maitra, popularly known as Pabitrada in the student circle, when I was an MSc student at the Calcutta University. As part of the M.Sc. degree, I had to do research on a topic of biochemical relevance and submit a thesis. My mentor, Professor SC Roy, directed me to work under Pabitrada's supervision, since he just finished his PhD thesis under Professor Roy. I was assigned to work on the biosynthesis of vitamin 812 by a bacterium Streptomyces olivaceus. Pabitrada was a prolific researcher and a demanding supervisor. Even though he finished his thesis work, he spent long hours in the laboratory and expected me to do the same. He was meticulous, dedicated, friendly, helpful and considered time spent outside the lab a total waste. His careful and constant supervision allowed me to publish a couple of papers in journals such as Bioclzimica et Biophysics Acta and Biochemical Journal". PROFESSIONAL CAREER AND SCIENTIFIC CONTRIBUTIONS In the autumn of 1960, Dr. Maitra joined the Johnson Research Foundation for Biophysics at the School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA, as a post-doctoral fellow. As Ronald W Estabrook, then Associate Professor in the Johnson Foundation, now Ashbel-Smith Emeritus Professor of Biochemistr Cecil and Ida Green Chair in the Biomedical Sciences at the University of Biographical Memoirs Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, USA recalls, "Under the dynamic leadership of a brilliant physical chemist/electronic engineer named Britton Chance (BC), the Johnson FoundationUF) was a world-famous fountainhead for research on hemeproteins involved in biological electron-transport reactions, in particular reactions of ATP synthesis by mitochondria. The JF was a beehive of activity with a continual stream of visiting scientists from all parts of the world that came to the JF to test their favorite reaction using the specialized spectrophotometric instruments developed by BC for measuring the role of cellular oxidation-reduction pigments in a variety of cellular functions.