WELCOME

Devised by Alistair Johnson this site showcases the DNA work of Prof V Sasisekharan (Sasi) and his team, principally N Pattabiraman and G Gupta together with M Bansal, S Rao, S Brahmachari, K Samir, P Parrack, N Ramaswamy, S Datta, M Rajagopalan, M Conrad and K Majumder.

This body of work mainly published between 1976 and 1984 was initiated, directed and overseen by Sasi. It examined the component elements of the DNA molecule in a coherent way and at a level of detail that had not been attempted previously and has not been repeated since.

Their unique technical research work, initially supported in part by separate but exactly contemporary theoretical work from a team in New Zealand produced an alternative model of the DNA model, a side by side model (SBS) that may be one of the most important discoveries in science.

Alternatively they may have made fundamental errors, their work may be flawed and their conclusions mistaken.

People may have opinions about the validity of their work but no one can say for sure until or unless the work is repeated and either confirmed or refuted.

This website aims to introduce Sasi and his team’s work to anyone with a general interest but more significantly it brings a core element of the work together in one place so that workers in the field some of whom may never have heard of SBS can access it easily.

Ten of Sasi and his team’s core papers available on or linked from this site are listed in the table immediately below and can be found in the pull down menu Sasisekharan Papers together with a letter to A Johnson from 1982, a list of all Sasi’s DNA papers and the list of his entire academic publishing record

Also listed in the table are the dissertation and PhD thesis by (now) Prof Terry Stokes in the Stokes Papers pull down. Then in the Johnson Material pull down there is the 1981 UCL term paper or layman’s summary of Sasi’s work together with a simplified, hypothetical artist’s impression animation of how the molecule might look and a description of a DNA extraction procedure.

The About section is self explanatory as is the Contact Us section. We welcome questions and the FAQ section will build as we answer them.

The point of this website is to try and reopen the debate about this potentially enormously important departure and encourage someone, anyone to take up the challenge and repeat their research work to see if Sasi and his team are right or not.

We would like to thank the publishers of Current Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Nucleic Acids Research, Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics, Social Studies of Science, University of Melbourne and Prof Terry Stokes for their kind permissions regarding the publication of the papers on this site.

THIS SITE IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF FRED BRETT OF UCL WHOSE COMMITMENT TO THE HIGHEST PRINCIPLES OF EDUCATION MADE IT POSSIBLE