Flight travel can be a cosmic yawn of boredom or an opportunity to think creatively. For Narayana Peesapaty, Research scientist at the International Crop Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), the in-flight time served plenty of food for thought. By the time the plane landed, Narayana Peesapaty had decided to make his in-flight idea of ‘edible cutlery’ a reality.

Narayana Peesapaty of BK Environmental Innovations Private Limited, a Hyderabad start-up company makes Edible Cutlery, using a mixture of sorghum jowar (corn), rice and wheat flour as an alternative to the environmentally-detrimental plastic and wood cutlery. According to Peesapaty, the sale of plastic cutlery growing at a rate of 30 per cent is generating significant non-biodegradable waste and contributing to overflowing landfills.

“Edible Cutlery is the only solution that provides the same convenience of disposable forks, spoons and chopsticks,” says Narayana Peesapaty.He shares his experience with www.nanomaya.com about his innovative product.

Nm: Why did you think of Edible Cutlery? Can you describe the Eureka moment?

NP: The concept of Edible Cutlery was born about 5 years ago, while returning from Ahmedabad to Hyderabad. Post Kandahar, in-flight catering most often carried plastic cutlery. Plastic cutlery being not quite convenient and thinking about the huge garbage each plane load brings in, I was wondering could not be there any alternative? It was a two hour long journey from Ahmedabad to Hyderabad and with nothing else to think about, I set myself thinking about and by the time I landed, the EUREKA moment happened.

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Nobel Laureate Professor Sidney Altman wooed teachers and students alike during his visit to the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore. Drawing enthusiastic crowds, and bombarded with questions Prof. Altman responded to each one of them passionately.

He was all for genetically modified food saying it would contribute to the success of food sufficiency. However he was not in favour of biofuels which, ““cannot be the solution” that mankind is looking for. There is no indication that biofuels can ever substitute fossil fuels,” he said and warned that it could scale up prices of wheat, maize and milk in every country.
 
Altman received his Nobel prize in 1989 for discovering the catalytic properties of the RNA( Ribonucleic acid). Since then, RNA technology has evolved leaps and bounds; for example, Purdue scientists are able to treat cancer using RNA nanotechnology.

Calling for a more proactive collaboration between the industry and the academia, Prof. Altman reiterated that without the “basic interest in science,” it was not possible to go too far and urged students to develop a keen interest and passion in science. Professor Altman’s interest in science began in school when he first encountered the magical Mendeleev’s periodic table.

Inspiration Science!
We all get inspired, and variously. And what inspired Prof Altman? The Russian chemist Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements!

My own memory of the periodic table goes back to school when my chemistry teacher unfurled a dusty cloth and hung it on the wall of my classroom. We all looked at the table imprinted on the cloth curiously. But, beyond the novelty of strange names, numbers and formulae, it didn’t speak much to me or to any of my classmates I am sure, yeah; we were not cut out to be Nobel Laureates alright.

But I wanted to revisit the periodic table after speaking briefly to Prof Altman last Saturday. My Internet search took me to teachersdomain.org, which has a very interesting interactive model of the periodic table.

Don’t worry, if you don’t have Flash, you can still view it and refresh your memory with interesting information about the elements and their chemical properties. Play with it. I did, it was fun. And no, any amount of viewing will not help you get a Nobel Prize if it doesn’t speak to you! But, you might want to ask yourself, what is it that the periodic table said to Altman that it is not saying to you?

As Prof Altman says, “first of all you need to have a basic interest in science, and it takes a lot of hard work and perseverance to be successful.”

In his autobiography Prof Altman recounts,“Am conscious of two events that sparked my early interest in science, the first being the appearance of the A-bomb. The mystique associated with the bomb, the role that scientists played in it, and its general importance could not fail to impress even a six-year old. About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power.”

“Indeed, we all have our creative moments, moments that inspire us to think beyond ourselves and the immediate surrounding. Alas, with our lack of will or faith to act on the magical moment, we bury many a genius that’s inside us.

Nanomaya prods you gently to return to the realm of magical moments and walk into the orchard of new discoveries; for ideas are not infinitesimal, only our thinking makes it so.

Remember Newton, who was inspired by a falling apple that ultimately led to the discovery of Gravity?

And, recall the mathematical genius Ramanujan who followed numbers or was it numbers that followed him? Remember the taxicab number 1729 that was named after him, the Hardy-Ramanujan number, which is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways?)…

And what’s your magical moment?