ry that you should be knowing. America gives advice to the world,
right? You know DOTs is being scrapped. Alternate day, twice a
week, thrice a week DOT is being scrapped, but the advice came
from the West. There’s a New England paper 2-3 years ago that
traced back how America recommended DOTs for the world – no
culture, only smears, no drug sensitivity testing - but within Amer-
ica, it never followed any of their advice. The reason was, because
of certain agreements with WHO, America had to pay a large share
of the expense. If they gave the correct advice, which they followed
for themselves, they would have paid a lot from their pocket. So they
simply gave the wrong advice, which was cheap! And this is in the
NEJM. You can go back and read. So knowing this, can you rely
on the west? Everyone has vested interests and that is to be kept in
mind. TB is your problem. It is not their problem. So, not to invest
in it would be foolish. It’s a contagious disease, so we are at risk!
There was a program by CSIR called open source drug discovery.
I’ll tell you something interesting that the person who imagined
open source drug discovery told me. He told me that, “I don’t expect
much from the AIIMS and IIT guys. You guys are too self-satisfied
and happy with yourself. And you don’t want to work with people
whom you feel are not too high quality.” Which is all true!
To build things in scale, one has to follow the LINUX path. Linux
was built by ordinary people’s communities. Basically saying you
may have one really super smart guy. But when you have one thou-
sand pairs of eyes, they’ll catch the mistake made by the super smart
guy. It’s 99% perspiration and only 1% genius. When we work to-
gether, what is one guy’s strength? So, he believed that commitment
and ability to work in mixed groups would be the biggest strengths
in Indian research in the coming years. And all future research pro-
grams should be built in that fashion. He’s no longer DG and his
visions will not come out to be true so no need to worry! Humility
comes in many interesting ways. If you want to build something
big, you’ll have to work with all kind of people. Big things don’t
occur with small no. of people, they occur with large no. of people.
There’ll never be all super bright AIIMSonians working on one sin-
gle project.
So, I think there are phenomenal opportunities for you guys now. I
think the world of medicine will change so much that people from
2030 would turn back and not even recognize the kind of medicine
we practice today. Well, we have a big data team that’d be up for a
meeting in a few minutes now.
SP: Oh! Thank you so much Sir. It’s been very enlighten-
ing and inspiring, talking to you.
AA: Sure! It’s been a pleasure for me too.
VP: Thank you Sir!