R.A. Mashelkar, a Fellow at India's National Chemical Laboratory, has called for more "irreverance" among Indian scientists in order to generate original ideas. His article on sciencemag.org begins with the following paragraph:
Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman believed that creative pursuit in science requires irreverence. Sadly, this spirit is missing from Indian science today. As other nations pursue more innovative approaches to solving problems, India must free itself from a traditional attitude that condemns irreverence, so that it too can address local and global challenges and nurture future leaders in science. But how can the spirit of adventurism come to Indian science?
Mashalkar has cited adherance to traditions, text-book centred rather than student centred teaching, and bureacratic barriers as limiting the pursuit of original ideas.
In 2004, paleontologists digging in the Canadian Arctic unearthed the
fossil of a 375-million-year-old creature named Tiktaalik that possessed
both the scales of a fish and the sturdy, jointed limb bones of a land
animal—and this single, perfect transitional fossil bridged the
evolutionary gap between water and land, showing the exact moment our
distant ancestors began to crawl out of the sea.
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In 1999, three paleontologists made a decision that would, five years
later, lead them to one of the most important fossil discoveries of the
twenty-firs...
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