Human genome studies and intellectual property rights: Whither national interests?

India has been acknowledged as a large reservoir of nature's random mutation, an original 'rich' source of knowledge in the context of international genome studies. Human genome knowledge and the possible understanding of the basis of uniqueness of each individual in chemical terms has presented a number of inescapable challenges to our own jurisprudence philosophies and our ethical sensibilities.

Scientometric analysis of some disciplines: Comparison of Indian institutions with other international institutions

We have carried out a three-part study comparing the research performance of Indian institutions with that of other international institutions. In the first part, the publication profiles of various Indian institutions were examined and ranked based on the h-index and p-index. We found that the institutions of national importance contributed the highest in terms of publications and citations per institution. In the second part of the study, we looked at the publication profiles of various Indian institutions in the high-impact journals and compared these profiles against that of the top Asian and US universities. We found that the number of papers in these journals from India was miniscule compared to the US universities. Recognizing that the publication profiles of various institutions depend on the field/departments, we studied the publication profiles of many science and engineering departments at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, the Indian Institutes of Technology, as well as top Indian universities. Because the number of faculty in each department varies widely, we have computed the publications and citations per faculty per year for each department. We have also compared this with other departments in various Asian and US universities. We found that the top Indian institution based on various parameters in various disciplines was IISc, but overall even the top Indian institutions do not compare favourably with the top US or Asian universities.