ALISTAIR JOHNSON – and how this website came to be
In 1976 while doing his ‘A’ levels (High school) Alistair saw a report on the two simultaneous papers by the New Zealand team and Prof Sasisekharan (Sasi) and his team in a journal. He read this as suggesting that there would be a difference between ‘living’ DNA and ‘dead’ DNA.
In 1980 studying Anthropology at UCL he did a course on the ‘Molecular Basis of Human Variation’ taught by the late Fred Brett to whose memory this site is dedicated. Discovering that Sasi’s team were still publishing he was allowed to write a summary of their work as a term paper (Johnson Material 16).
In early 1982 he sent the paper to Sasi with a suggestion to try to get a tv documentary made about their work and the strange failure of the DNA research establishment to respond properly/repeat it. Sasi replied (Sasisekharan Papers 11).
With no credibility in the science world Alistair wrote a novel based on the work, ‘A Singing Dancing Thing’ to try and get the story out. Opening with the liberation of Dachau, sweeping through the US Civil Rights struggle, the AIDS epidemic, the Gallo affair and climaxing in 1985 the novel engages the themes of power structures and abuse of proper procedure that are central to this story.
In 2008 Alistair contacted Pat and started again to try and reach out to tv production companies, broadcasters etc. In 2012 he produced an animation of the proposed alternative DNA molecule (Johnson Material 17) incorporating it into a 3.5 min ‘stinger’ film that got the proposed documentary a very enthusiastic initial response from BBC’s Horizon strand in 2015.
At the same time Alistair discovered that Sasi was still alive, then a sprightly 82 year old, which brought new urgency to the whole thing. Alistair also connected with Terry Stokes and read his Dissertation and PhD thesis. (Stokes Papers 14 and 15).
Sasi is now nearly 87 and we are all getting old so getting this story out now is very important and has lead to the development of this website.
It is our hope that this site creates enough of a buzz among a generation who may never have heard of the SBS to ask the basic questions about how/why the work has never been repeated. It would be tremendous if that were then to happen.
The work will either be found to be right or wrong. If it’s wrong that will be that but if it’s right – what a story.
RESEARCHER BIOS
VISWANATHAN SASISEKHARAN (SASI)
Sasi is a world-renowned Biophysicist and is known for his pioneering contributions to the structures of biopolymers. In 1962, he developed the (φ, ψ) plot, which provides important information about the energetically allowed conformations of polypeptides. This work laid the foundation for a deeper understanding of protein folding and is still used to this day to validate the designs of new proteins.
Sasi has been a Visiting Professor at Princeton University and an Adjunct Professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Sasi was a Professor and Chairman of the Molecular Biophysics Unit at the Indian Institute of Science for several decades and Division Chairman of Chemical and Biological Sciences at the institute. In these various roles he mentored scores of graduate students.
It was at the Institute that he pursued his work on an alternative model for the Watson Crick Double Helix which is the focus of this website.
Among the numerous national and international awards Sasi has received is the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research’s Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of India’s highest science awards, in 1977, for his contributions to the biological sciences.
NAGARAJAN PATTABIRAMAN (PAT)
Pat completed his MSc in nuclear physics at University of Madras in 1974 when he became the first PhD student of Sasi’s team working on the fine detailed analysis of the DNA molecule which lead to the SBS model. The focus of his work was the conformational flexibility of the sugar phosphate ‘backbone’.
In 1980 he went to work at Robert Langridge’s Computer Graphics Lab in San Francisco, continuing to work on nucleic acid structures.
Moving to Washington DC in 1987 Pat worked at National Research Laboratory (NRL) and National Cancer Institute (NCI). In 2002 he joined Georgetown University becoming an Associate Professor in the field of anti cancer drug discovery and development.
In 2006 he went to Walter Reed Army Institute of Research heading the Computational Chemistry group and left in 2011.
In 2009 Pat set up MolBox LLC providing consulting services for biomedical applications, recently working on RNA parallel structures for the treatment of HCV in collaboration with George Washington University.
Pat’s awards include a first place gold medal in the Master’s program (1974), a Young Scientist award for his Ph.D. work from the Indian National Academy of Sciences (1980) and a mentoring award from NCI for his outstanding mentorship of young scientists.