PennToday explores Vijay Balasubramanian's academic career.
Wandering through Kolkata’s markets in India stimulates the mind. Hawkers’ cries pass through the inner ear as electrical signals; the pungent, earthy smell of turmeric enters the brain through olfactory sensory neurons. In 1976, a 7-year-old Vijay Balasubramanian had his own market revelation through a bookseller’s portico, where the cover of a slim volume showed a man peering through a microscope lens and a smattering of white paint scattered like stars across the firmament of man and machine.
“What is a scientist?” the book asked, running through a series of exciting adventure shots: archeologic discovery, venom extraction, missile control. In that moment, Balasubramanian knew he would be a scientist. It looked, he says, “amazingly cool.”