Portrait photo of Vir Chauhan.
Vir Chauhan
India & St Catherine's 1974
Born in Agra, Vir Chauhan studied chemistry at the University of Delhi before going to Oxford to read for a DPhil in chemistry. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Georgia, he returned to India and took up an academic post at the University of Delhi. In 1988, Chauhan moved to the newly founded International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Delhi, working on immunology and particularly on blood stage malaria vaccine development. He became director of the ICGEB in 1998. Alongside his academic work, Chauhan has been a crucial supporter of the Rhodes Scholarships, serving as secretary for the Scholarships in India. He has also been an ongoing supporter and selector for other scholarships, including the Inlaks, Felix and Dr. Manmohan Singh scholarships. This narrative is excerpted from an interview with the Rhodes Trust on 26 November 2024.
‘I made rapid progress’
Although I was born in Agra, I grew up in Delhi and this is also where I went to college and have spent the whole of my working life. We were a very poor family with six children and home was quite cramped. My mother did not speak any English but was keen that we should start our education at home, so she started teaching me in her mother tongue, which is Hindi. I made rapid progress and when my mother took me to school, they asked me to read a book which I could do very quickly. They kept giving me harder ones, and I went straight into class three, missing out kindergarten.
I loved going to school. Alongside my academic studies I really liked practical things and those were very much part of school as well, with classes in wood-cutting and handicrafts. By the eighth or ninth class, I was clearly more attracted to sciences. I liked chemistry because of the experiments, and I remember one in particular where we added an acid base indicator to turmeric and it changed colour completely from yellow to red. I had no exposure to English until the eighth or ninth class. Because I was two years younger than the other children in my class, when I came to take my eleventh-class examination, I was under-age. To enable me to write the exam, my date of birth was actually changed. It was almost like a fraud.
On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship
I went on to the University of Delhi to study chemistry and I realised that if I worked hard and attended classes, I could get good results. Delhi University is very much structured like Oxford and Cambridge, with colleges, and most of the Rhodes Scholars came from St Stephen’s College. I got to know a lot of students there through running, which I loved because it gave me such a sense of freedom. St Stephen’s had a serious athletics team, and it was through people in that that I got to know about the Rhodes Scholarship. I hadn’t heard of it before then.
By the time I was 20, I was already doing my PhD and teaching undergraduates. I was halfway through my PhD when another Rhodes Scholar said that I should apply for the Scholarship. We were interviewed in Mumbai and I have to say that when I was chosen, it wasn’t really a ‘Wow’ moment. I didn’t really understand at that point the impact that the Rhodes Scholarship could have. That only dawned on me when I arrived in Oxford.
‘Science in England was moving much faster than I realised’
When I got to Oxford, I was bewildered. I’d never been to England before. In St Catherine’s College, I was lucky enough to sit next to the master at dinner. He couldn’t believe it when I told him that Delhi University had 150,000 students. He said, ‘Look, we don’t even have 11,000 at Oxford.’
Oxford was just amazing and it had very good scientists and very good teachers, but the true transformation for me came because my DPhil supervisor gave me the time to learn things. I needed to catch up because I had been poorly taught in Delhi. I was doing a second doctorate, in chemistry, making molecules which were biologically active. We were all very serious students at that time and science in England was moving much faster than I realised.
‘Whatever they threw at me, I worked on’
After I’d finished my DPhil in Oxford, I went to the US for a year, to the University of Georgia. America was a different world, and I enjoyed every minute of running a research lab, but I just never wanted to live anywhere other than India. I could have gone back to teaching at St. Stephen’s College. They had kept my job open. But then, I would never have been able to do any research, so instead, I joined IIT (the Indian Institute of Technology), which was very competitive to get into at that time. Teaching undergraduates there was just a totally different ballgame, and I realised how much I enjoyed it. Even so, I chose to go back to Delhi University. My parents were there and my girlfriend was there too. Academically, it looked like a foolish thing to do, because setting up a lab in Delhi in the late 1970s and early 1980s was very, very difficult. The country was poor and there was very little infrastructure. But we dug in, we were very lucky to get funding from the government quickly.
I stayed in Delhi University for seven years and they promoted me to become professor when I was 37 or 38. I was working with fantastic students. But then I was offered a post at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology. The work I had been doing at Oxford, synthesising biomolecules, was of premium value. No more than ten people in India were doing it at that time. I didn’t think twice. It was a new institute, started by the United Nations, and I was not scared to take up problems that I hadn’t thought about before: whatever they thew at me, I worked on.
My group had started by working to make nucleotides, the pieces of DNA vital for genetic research. We were doing well. Then my director called me in and suggested that I should start to look at malaria research. I hardly knew about malaria at the time and I was scared that I was out my depth and moving into an area that was growing very fast. I had to adopt the attitude I had learned from running, which was that if you don’t win, you don’t win. But in fact, we were very lucky and soon, we had one of the most vibrant malaria groups in India and in the world. We carried a vaccine through the first phase one trial. After that, I also started looking at the problem of antibiotic resistance.
I joined ICGEB in 1988 and became director ten years later, only closing my lab there last year. I’ve fully retired now but I do have a small startup company with some of my students. Over the course of my career, I have had around 100 PhD students and countless Master’s students, along with dozens of postdocs. It’s been hugely enjoyable. I’m particularly satisfied that more than half of my students were women and 70% of my students doing science came from first-time learning families in India. I’m also proud of the fact that I was involved in the Rhodes selection committees, becoming secretary for India. I played a part in widening the Scholarship, getting students from more institutions to apply.
‘We need to de-emphasise the idea of specialness now’
I was lucky that I was picked as a Rhodes Scholar, and what drove me on, year on year, to be involved in scholarship committees for Rhodes and other scholarships too was seeing very, very bright candidates. I knew that in the 1980s and 1990s especially, 90% of the population of India wouldn’t be able to take up these scholarships because they did not speak English, but I thought we could keep increasing that population, bit by bit. That’s what drove me on. And you learn so much by listening to younger people, because although I’ve been a ferocious reader all my life, I’ve never read as much as they have read in their own subject.
I think in India, for many years to come, the Rhodes Scholarship, and other scholarships, like the Inlaks, will be a real opportunity. We have 14 million people in higher education in India and giving them the opportunity to study in Europe is so important, although I am worried that the prevalence of master’s degrees means that students will arrive and not really have more than a year to immerse themselves in their studies.
My personal opinion is that we may now have gone too far in emphasising to applicants for the Rhodes Scholarship that they should be solving the problems of the world. As Rhodes Scholars, we are ordinary people. We are luckier than others, but I don’t think we are special people and I think in all seriousness we need to de-emphasise that idea of specialness now. If you are a good human being and you have good values and you are serious in your work, you will end up doing good things.