Almost 20 years ago I had started suspecting that Streptomyces the genus of actinobacteria known to be the richest in the diversity of antibiotics and other secondary metabolites was a predator of bacteria in soil. Soon a PhD student, Charu Kumbhar took up the challenge and demonstrated with multiple lines of evidence that predatory abilities were quite widespread in the genus. We also developed an argument, quite well supported by facts that most, if not all, antibiotics primarily evolved for predation. Only some of them were selected for other ecological functions. A time lapse video of how the growing mycelia of Streptomyces attack other bacteria was quite dramatic. We were quite thrilled at the discovery.
But publishing this was next to impossible. Nobody believed us. Reviewers couldn’t say anything was wrong in the MS, just that they did not believe this. We ultimately published a couple of papers, Charu’s PhD got through. We had actually opened up a new potential way of looking for new antibiotics. I tried raising money to explore the possibility, but with no luck. At some stage I was able to divert some money from a dumb and therefore well-funded project. We came close to isolating a new interesting antibiotic from the act of predation. But this was the time I took up fights with the institute and left.
Now time has proven that our idea was correct. A lab in Finland independently showed the phenomenon of predation by Streptomyces, this time on yeast. They uncovered much detailed molecular details which we hadn’t. Interestingly they faced problems in publishing it too, and for the same reason. Reviewers did not want to believe. Ultimately the paper came out last month. Almost simultaneously another review was published in Nature Reviews Microbiology who agreed that Streptomyces are predatory and cited us. (For those who believe in impact factors, it was 102 in 2024). So, what we discovered over a decade early is getting increasing acceptance and importance now. Even earlier than all this, prior to the genome era, we had tried to estimate the number of antibiotics not yet discovered from this genus. Our estimate was of over a million. Then came genomics and they showed the same. A large number of secondary metabolite gene clusters were abundant in Streptomyces genome, whose products were not yet found. Independent of this, new ways of exploring antibiotics have now yielded antibiotics with very interesting characteristics.
I don’t know why, this has kept on repeating with me. In the year 1999, our undergraduates convincingly showed for the first time, the phenomenon of “theory of mind” in birds. This was a time when this ability was being debated in chimpanzees. So showing that in the bird brained creatures was unexpected. We published in Current Science, but it got excellent response. Very soon there many were papers in big journals including Nature on similar lines.
In 2011, we pointed out using a mathematical model that the idea of “thrifty gene” wasn’t sound, even theoretically. The conditions necessary for evolution of such a gene did not exist during human evolution. In just another year, the same conclusion was reached with a different mathematical approach by a group in UK and they published it in a much higher prestige journal.
During the peak of Covid 19 pandemic, we showed that the evolution of new viral variants is not mutation limited but selection limited. This was in stark contrast with the mainstream belief. By this time I had decided to quit academia and had started working independently. Obviously, any journal with APC was not an option available. We published in Qeios. Four years later the same conclusion was published by a multi-national group in ISEMPH, an Oxford journal. I pointed this out to the authors, who had not cited us. They gave an honest response and wrote to editor requesting a correction in which they wanted to include our prior work. The editor did not respond.
I have mixed feelings about such instances. Quite frequently my lab was ahead in thinking, often by several years. But that made publication very hard. Often we had to be content on publishing in smaller journals and those who showed the same thing after a few years got their papers published in more prestigious journals. We also failed to get funding for taking the concept forward. That happened many years later in some elite institution.
But I look at the other side of it. If this has happened many times in the past, it is also going to happen with so many novel concepts and results we have published already but nobody noticed them. That list is much bigger. I know our findings are theoretically sound and evidence supported and the world will rediscover them sooner or later, (the latter being more likely). This includes my interpretation of type 2 diabetes which completely defies all prevalent theories. Glucose and insulin are not central to diabetes, normalizing glucose does not reduce mortality or complications. Insulin resistance based theories are already proved wrong by reproducible experiments. T2DM and many other lifestyle disorders arise from “vitaction deficiency”, deficiency of a set of behaviours in the wild for which our physiology has evolved. Over 25 papers and 2 books are published on this so far, not a single counter-argument, but also no response in the public. Privately I have a number of appreciating responses, who didn’t want to say so publicly.
The same is the story with my analysis of the problems in wild life conservation policies in India. The increasing human wildlife conflict is well known, but the mainstream wants to hide the facts. Pretend that everything is alright. Our group published factual data, reasons why the prevalent policy is failing, what the alternative policy needs to be. I received a number of appreciations in the private. Hardly anyone wants to say anything in the public.
In 2022, a paper in BBS claimed that behaviour informed policy has failed to work at system level. But before this paper appeared, we had worked and published on behaviour optimized system design for dealing with crop loss by wild animals, an alternative to crop insurance, a long term policy for going beyond the caste system. Now I have also written about a behaviour optimized system design for academia. These ideas are not only theoretically novel and sound. One of them has been subject to successful experiments and pilot scale implementation. The concept of behaviour optimized policy can revolutionize governance and regulation, if and when it’s understood by the orthodox and dumb mainstream.
Then we have a completely different evolutionary reasoning and interpretation of cancer, that has a potential for cancer prevention. We have one publication but much more unpublished and partly developed work on how to make causal analysis from regression-correlation parameters alone, which can revolutionize data science.
Also under development is a radically different and more sound interpretation of currently dirty, ambiguous and anomalous concepts such as inflammation, stress and aging. I know the mainstream will not recognize this thinking during my lifetime perhaps. But I enjoy working this way. Perhaps the undergrads and other non-academic volunteer researchers that I work with might be benefited too. They also enjoy for sure. Being ahead of time in thinking and seeing things with clarity is a reward by itself. Whether mainstream academia recognizes this as science or not, I don’t care. If they don’t, they are at loss, not me.
My science, My way 