Coming home

摘要

Reagents may be slow to arrive, but the freedom to explore his own research interests more than compensates. Satyajit Mayor is thriving in India. It can never be the same as doing science in America." This was the near-unanimous response from my peers when, in late 1995, I announced my decision to move back to India from the United States. By then, I had spent nearly 11 years in America, first as a graduate student at Rockefeller University and then as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Like most expatriates who long to return home, I had planned for many years to return to India ― but I kept putting it off. I worried that my career in India would become marked by obscurantist science, an ossified research set-up and cash-strapped institutes; that I would be surrounded by mediocre science and scientists; and that I would have to wait for weeks for supplies that can be in summoned in New York within a day.