NBRC Society President
i) Prof. P.N. Tandon Founder President of NBRC Society (From 2002 till 13 April 2021)
ii) Hon'ble Union Minister For Science & Technology
The Birth of the National Brain Research Centre
Brain research, in its modern 'avtar', had a comparatively late and patchy entry in India. Prior to our Independence, except for some mental hospitals, there were hardly any departments, leave aside full-fledged centres devoted to neurosciences. It was only in 1950s that our pioneers, like Professors Chandy, Ramamuthi, Baldev Singh, Ginde, Barucha, CGS Iyer and DK Dastur, on their return from training abroad, initiated specialized units of Neurosurgery, Neurology and Neuropathology in India. Around the same time, Professors B.K. Anand, Autar Paintal, B.K. Bachhawat and N.H. Keswani sowed the seeds of basic disciplines in neuroscience including Neurophysiology, Neurochemistry and Neuroanatomy. It is to the credit of these pioneers that while they concentrated on their own disciplines, they were conscious of the need to promote the development of allied disciplines. It was the dream of most of these pioneers to establish a multidisciplinary comprehensive neurosciences institute. The efforts of Prof. Chandy at CMC Vellore and the evolution of NIMHANS, Bangalore represent some early efforts in this direction. In the early 1960s, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences established nuclei of various basic and clinical neurosciences activities.
As early as December, 1964, Professors B.K. Anand and Baldev Singh approached the authorities to establish a Brain Research Centre at AIIMS. Paucity of funds and an urgent need to provide for specialized patient care services resulted in the establishment of the Clinical Neurosciences Centre at AIIMS by the mid-1970s. While the country witnessed the establishment of a fair number of state-of-art clinical neuroscience centres between 1950 and 1980, the development of basic neurosciences lagged behind.
The declaration of 1990s as the Decade of the Brain prompted the author to write to Prof. M.G.K. Menon, then Minister for Science and Technology, Government of India, the urgent need to establish a Brain Research Centre to promote basic research and training in Neurosciences. On his advice, the Department of Biotechnology along with the Department of Science and Technology organized a National Brain Storming Session on 31st August and 1st September, 1990 to discuss measures needed to promote neurosciences in the country.
One of the recommendations of this meeting was to establish a National Brain Research Centre. The Department of Biotechnology was assigned the responsibility to implement the recommendations of these deliberations. The Department established a Steering Committee which functioned through a number of sub-groups including Developmental Neurosciences, Neuro-immunology, Neuropsycho-pharmacology and Drug Addiction, Neurogenetics, Neuronal models and Neural Networks. A series of symposia were organized at different centres across the country to gather information about the ongoing research activities in the above disciplines of neuroscience, and to identify specific needs and opportunities of national relevance, taking note of the state-of-art internationally.
On the basis of the information generated through these symposia and discussions in the Steering Committee, a proposal for establishing the Brain Research Centre was sent to the Planning Commission by DBT. Prof. C.N. Rao, a good friend, was then Member (Science) of the Planning Commission. The Commission advised that instead of establishing a Centre immediately, activity in this field should be first initiated in R&D mode to generate a good infrastructural base and trained manpower. For this purpose, the Department supported 23 major research projects in neurosciences across the country between 1991 and 1995. At the same time, DBT along with DST, ICMR and National Information Centre provided financial support for the establishment of the NMR facility for Biomedical Research at AIIMS, New Delhi, the Neurosciences Information Centre and Brain Bank at NIMHANS, Bangalore and an animal behavior centre at CDRI, Lucknow.
Ultimately, on 5 October, 1995, during the Ninth Meeting of the Steering Committee on Neurosciences, the proposal for creating the National Brain Research Centre was revived. Dr. (Mrs.) Manju Sharma, the Secretary, DBT, strongly supported the proposal and advised the Steering Committee to give the proposal a "proper shape by defining the objectives and the plan of action". After detailed discussions, it was decided to establish the Centre as an autonomous institute of the DBT at New Delhi. The overall aim of the Centre was to undertake, promote, guide and coordinate nationally relevant and internationally competitive research in all aspects of neurosciences. It was planned to bring together at one place scientists from diverse fields of neurosciences and allied disciplines, both biological and others and provide them with optimal facilities and opportunities to carry out research in this frontier area of science. A unique feature envisaged for the Centre was that it would act as a nodal point which would be linked to the already established peripheral centres in the country - the Centre was to be the "Hub of the Wheel" and not the wheel itself.
Following further discussions with the Planning Commission, Dr. Manju Sharma finally managed to announce the creation of a National Brain Research Centre on 14th November, 1997 as a part of the Golden Jubilee celebrations of India's Independence and the birth anniversary of our first Prime Minister, Shri Jawaharlal Nehru, the architect of modern science in India. A Management Advisory Committee chaired by the author was constituted.
by Prof. P N Tandon
