scients

Meghnad Saha

Meghnad Saha, one of the famous Physicist was born in Saroyatali village in Dacca (now in Bangladesh). He invented an instrument to measure the weight and pressure of solar rays. He produced the famous equation which he called 'equation of the reaction - isobar for ionization' which later became known as Saha's "Thermo-Ionization Equation". Saha was the leading spirit in organizing the scientific societies like the 'National Academy of Science' (1930), 'Indian Institute of Science' (1935) and the 'Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science' (1944). The lasting memorial to him is the 'Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics' founded in 1943 in Calcutta. He was the chief architect of river planning in India. He prepared the original plan for Damodar Valley Project

Chandrasekhar Venkata Raman

C.V.Raman was a scientist in Physics, who won noble prize in 1930. Raman was born on 7th November,1888 at Ayyanpettai in Tamil Nadu. He had his education in Visakhapatanam and Madras. After getting top ranking in the Financial Civil Service Competitive Exam, he was appointed as Deputy Accountant General in Calcutta (Kolkutta). In 1917 he became the professor of Physics at the Calcutta University. After 15 years service at the Calcutta University, Raman shifted to Bangalore and became the Director of the Indian Institute of Science in 1933. In 1943 he founded 'Raman Research Institute', near Bangalore. His discovery of the 'Raman Effect' made a very distinctive contribution to Physics. He was knighted by the British Government in 1929. He was also conferred the highest title of 'Bharat Ratna' in 1954. The 'Raman Effect' was a demonstration of the 'Collision' effect of light bullets (photons) passing through a transparent medium, whether solid, liquid or gaseous. Raman's publications include 'Molecular Diffraction of Light', 'Mechanical Theory of Bowed Strings' and 'Diffraction of X-ray's', 'Theories of Musical Instruments' etc. Raman conducted pioneering research in musical acoustics, particularly on Tamboura, the well known Indian musical instrument.

Dr. H. J. Bhabha

The eminent scientist who ushered India into the atomic age was Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha. He was born on 30 October 1909 in a Parsi family of Mumbai. He is called the 'Father of Indian Nuclear Science'. Dr.Bhabha was appointed the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, set up in 1948. It was largely due to his efforts that the nation's first Atomic research Center, now named Bhabha Atomic research Center, was established at Trombay, near Mumbai. Under his expert guidance the nation's first atomic reactor 'Apsara' was also commissioned in 1956. In 1945, he founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. Dr.Bhabha had a highly distinguished career and was an exceptionally bright student. Even as a student, he made some fundamental discoveries in electricity, magnetism, quantum theory and the cosmic rays. Dr.Bhabha as the scientist of a very high caliber, received many national and international awards and honours. In 1942, he was awarded the 'Adams' award. In 1951, Bhabha was elected the president of the Indian Science Congress. In 1955, he was elected the chairman of the U.N. sponsored International conference on the peaceful uses of the atomic energy held in Geneva. The Government of India also honoured him with 'Padma Bhushan' in 1954. The 'Homi Jehangir Bhabha Award' has been instituted by Indian National Science Academy. He passed away in 1966 in a plane crash.

Dr. Hargobind Khorana

Dr. Hargobind Khorana was born on 9th January 1922 at Raipur, Punjab (now in Pakistan). Dr.Khorana was responsible for producing the first man-made gene in his laboratory in the early seventies. This historic invention won him the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1968 sharing it with M.W. Nuremberg and R.W. Holley for interpreting the genetic code and analyzing its function in protein synthesis.

They all independently made contributions to the understanding of the genetic code and how it works in the cell. Khorana, born into a poor family attended D.A.V. High School in Multan, took his M.Sc from Punjab University at Lahore and in 1945 he went to England on a government scholarship and obtained a PhD from the University of Liverpool (1948). Dr. Khorana spent a year in Zurich in 1948-49 as a post-doctoral fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and returned to India for a brief period in 1949. He returned to England in 1950 and spent two years on a fellowship at Cambridge and began research on nucleic acids under Sir Alexander Todd and Kenner. His interest in proteins and nucleic acids took root at that time. In 1952 he went to the University of British Columbia, Vancouver on a job offer and there a group began to work in the field of biologically interesting phosphate esters and nucleic acids with the inspiration from Dr. Gordon M. Shrum and Scientific counsel from Dr. Jack Campbell. In 1960 he joined the University of Wisconsin as Professor and co-Director of the Institute of Enzyme Research and Professor of Biochemistry (1962-70) and became an US citizen. Khorana continued research on nucleic acid synthesis and prepared the first artificial copy of a yeast gene. Dr. Khorana is also the first to synthesize oligonucleotides, that is, strings of nucleotides. These custom designed pieces of artificial genes are widely used in biology labs for sequencing, cloning and engineering new plants and animals. The oligo nucleotides, thus, have become indispensable tools in biotechnology. In 1970 he became the Alfred Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Khorana now settled in America, is married to Esther Elizabeth Sibler from Switzerland and they have three children. Apart from the Nobel Prize, Khorana has won many awards and honors for his achievement. Distinguished Service Award, Watumull Foundation, Honolulu, Hawaii (1968); American Academy of Achievement Award, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1971); Padma Vibushan, Presidential Award, India (1972); J.C.Bose Medal, Bose Institute, Calcutta (1972) and Willard Gibbs medal of the Chicago Section of American Chemical Society (1973-74). He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Washington as well as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1971 he became a foreign member of USSR Academy of Sciences and in 1974 an Honorary Fellow of the Indian Chemical Society. Khorana's work, which is an important scientific landmark of the twentieth century, has brought closer the day when synthetic DNA may be introduced into the defective human tissues to bring about their repair or treat mentally retarded people and change them into more intelligent and healthy human beings. His synthesis of RNA, capable of replication in laboratory, is a step towards the creation of life artificially. In fact, the researches has opened up a new branch called Genetic Engineering in Science.

Jagadish Chandra Bose

Jagdish Chandra Bose was an Indian physicist who pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics. Bose was born in Mymensingh in Bengal (now in Bangladesh) on November 30, 1858. His father, Bhagawan Chandra Bose worked as a tax collector for the British East India Company. His family originally hailed from the village Rarikhal, Bikrampur, in the current day Dhaka District of Bangladesh. Having started his studies in a local school, Bose studied at the St. Xavier's School and College at Kolkata. He passed the Entrance examination (equivalent to school graduation) of Calcutta University in 1875. He received a B.A. in Science from Calcutta University in 1879. Next, Bose went to England to study at Christ's College, Cambridge. He received a B.A. from Cambridge University and a B.Sc. from the London University in 1884. After completing his studies in London, Bose return to Kolkatta and was appointed Professor at Presidency College in Kolkatta. Then he became the director of the institute he founded and remained in the post till his death on 23rd November 1937. Jagadish Chandra Bose was one of the pioneers of modern science in India. His research was on the properties of electro-magnetic waves.

His major achievement was to demonstrate the similarity of responses to stimulation among the living and the nonliving as well as the fundamental similarity of responses in plant and animal tissues. The British Government knighted him in 1917. He founded the 'Bose Research Institute' in Kolkatta in 1917. Bose was not only a biologist, but also a physicist. Bose believed that by focusing on the boundaries between different physical and biological sciences, he would be able to demonstrate the underlying unity of all things. Bose's biological researches were founded initially by the discovery that an electric receiver seems to show science of fatigue after continued use. He can rightly be called the inventor of wireless telegraphy. Bose was the first in the world to fabricate and demonstrate in public (1985) the device that generated microwaves-radio waves of very short wave length. But his invention was not patented before Guglielmo Marconi (1896) who became internationally recognised as the inventor.

Subramanyan Chandrasekhar

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a Nobel Laureate in Physics and one of the greatest astrophysicists of modern times was born on October 19, 1910 in Lahore, (now in Pakistan) to parents Chandrasekhara Subrahmanya Ayyaa civil servant and Sita Balakrishnan. Being the nephew of the great, C.V. Raman, a Nobel Prize winner in Physics young Chandrashekhar's interest in the subject came naturally to him. In 1930, at the age of 19, he completed his degree in Physics from Presidency College, Madras and went to England for postgraduate studies at the Cambridge University. Chandrasekhar was noted for his work in the field of stellar evolution, and in the early 1930s he was the first to theorize that a collapsing massive star would become an object so dense that not even light could escape it; now known as the Black hole. He demonstrated that there is an upper limit ( known as 'Chandrasekhar Limit' ) to the mass of a White dwarf star. His theory challenged the common scientific notion of the 1930s that all stars, after burning up their fuel, became faint, planet-sized remnants known as white dwarfs. But today, the extremely dense neutron stars and black holes implied by Chandrasekhar's early work are a central part of the field of astrophysics. Initially his theory was rejected by peers and professional journals in England. The distinguished astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington publicly ridiculed his suggestion that stars could collapse into such objects( black holes). Disappointed, and reluctant to engage in public debate, Chandrasekhar moved to America and in 1937 joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Chicago and remained there till his death. At Chicago, he immersed himself in a personalized style of research and teaching, tackling first one field of astrophysics and then another in great depth. He wrote more than half a dozen definitive books describing the results of his investigations. More than 100,000 copies of his highly technical books have been sold. He also served as editor of the Astrophysical Journal, the field's leading journal, for nearly 20 years; presided over a thousand colloquia; and supervised Ph.D. research for more than 50 students. Chandrasekhar was a creative, prolific genius whose ability to combine mathematical precision with physical insight changed humanity's view of stellar physics.

In addition to his work on star degeneration, he has contributed significantly to many disparate branches of physics, including rotational figures of equilibrium, stellar interiors, radiative transfer of energy through the atmospheres of stars, hydro magnetic stability and many others. He won the Nobel Prize in 1983 and received 20 honorary degrees, was elected to 21 learned societies and received numerous awards in addition to the Nobel Prize, including the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society of London; the Royal Medal of the Royal Society, London; the National Medal of Science, the Rumford Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences. NASA's premier X-ray observatory was named the Chandra X-ray Observatory in his honor. He and his wife, Lalitha became American citizens in 1953. This genius passed away on 21 August 1995 in Chicago, Illinois, USA..

Dr.Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar

Dr. Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar is known as 'The Father of Research Laboratories'. He is remembered for having established various chemical laboratories in the country. He was born in Bera, Punjab. After completing his M.Sc in India he went to England on a fellowship. On his return he served as a professor in Benaras Hindu University. He used to spent all his spare time in his laboratory doing research. He was awarded the title 'Sir' by the British in recognition of his service to Science, in 1941. As Nehru was much in favour of scientific development after Independence, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research was set up under the chairmanship of Dr. Bhatnagar. Later, he was awarded 'Padma Bhushan'. He became the first director-general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 1940. After his death, CSIR established a Bhatnagar Memorial award for eminent scientists in his honour.

Srinivasa Ramanujan

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a great Mathematician, who became world famous at the age of twenty six. He was born at Erode in Tamil Nadu on 22 December 1887. Ramanujan could not complete his college education because of illness. He was so interested in mathematics that he learned on his own. He found out new formulas for solving mathematical problems and wrote articles about them. Professor Hardy a scientist in the Cambridge University saw one his article and impressed by his knowledge, took Ramanujan to England. Ramanujan was considered as the master of theory of numbers. The most outstanding of his contributions was his formula for p (n), the number of 'partitions' of 'n'. It was in 1914, while he was working in Trinity College he developed the 'Number Theory' and for his valuable contribution, was elected fellow of Trinity College on 18th October 1917. He returned to India in 1919 and began Research. He passed away on 26 April 1920. Government of India issued a commemorative stamp in his honour. Indian National Science academy and many other scientific institutions in India are giving various awards in memory of this brilliant mathematician

Vikram.A.Sarabhai

Vikram.A.Sarabhai, was the main personality behind the launching of India's first satellite, Aryabhata in 1975. He was born in Ahmedabad, Gujarat in a family of industrialists. He was also responsible for the Equatorial Rocket Building Station at Thumba. Sarabhai set up the Ahmedabad Textile Industries Research Association, a laboratory for research in Physics and the Indian Institute of Management. Sarabhai was the second chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission and the Indian Space Research Organisation. Sarabhai's study of cosmic rays under the eminent scientist Dr. C.V. Raman, revealed that cosmic rays are a stream of energy particles reaching the earth from the outer space, being influenced on their way by the sun, the atmosphere and magnetism. This study helps in observing terrestrial magnetism and the atmosphere, the nature of the sun and outer space. He was conferred 'Padma Shri' in 1966 and was posthumously awarded 'Padma Vibushan' in 1972. He was also awarded 'Dr. Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize' in 1962. This great scientist could be credited with launching India into space age.

Professor Raj Reddy

Professor Raj Reddy, one of the prominent scientists in computer science in the US, is presently serving as the Director of the West Coast campus of Carnegie Mellon University, USA. Professor Reddy a native Indian, earned a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Guindy Engineering college of the University of Madras, India, in 1958 and a Master's degree in technology from the University of New South Wales, Australia, in 1960. He received a doctor's degree in Computer science from Stanford University in 1966 and the same year began his academic career as an Assistant Professor in the same University. Since 1969 for over three decades, the professor has been a member of the Carnegie Mellon University faculty. He served as the Founding Director of the Robotics Institute at the University from 1979 to 1991. For the next ten years, he served as the Dean and professor of Computer Science and Robotics, at the School of Computer Science and now as the Director of the West coast campus. Dr. Reddy's research interests include the study of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. His main area of work is in artificial intelligence in particular with computers that can see, hear, walk, talk etc. His current research project include speech recognition and universal digital libraries, an Information Appliance for rural environments for use by illiterate people, where all creative works of the human race are available to anyone anywhere.

Professor Raj Reddy's achievements are many. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Acoustical Society of America and the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1984 and also awarded the Legion of Honor by President Mitterand of France. He is a member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academy of Sciences and was Chairman of the DARPA Information Science and Technology Group from 1987 to 1990. He was president of AAAI from 1987 to 1989. He is on the Technology Advisory Board of Microsoft Corp. and received the IBM Research Ralph E. Gomory Visiting Scholar Award in 1991. He was the Co-Chair of the PITAC (President's Information Technology Advisory Committee) from 1999 to 2001under both Clinton and Bush. In 1994, Professor Redy received jointly with Edward Peigenbaum, the Turing Award which is the most prestigious in the computer science "For pioneering the design and construction of large scale artificial intelligence systems, demonstrating the practical importance and potential commercial impact of artificial intelligence technology". He also received the prestigious Padma Bhushan Award for his outstanding contributions in computer science and information technology from President K.R. Narayanan of India in an award ceremony in New Delhi. He has been awarded honorary doctorates (Doctor of Science Honoris Causa) from SV University in India, Universite Henri-Poincare in France, University of New South Wales in Australia, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in India, University of Massachusetts in USA, University of Warwick in England, Anna University in India and the Indian Institute for Information Technology (Allahabad) .

On the personal front, Dr. Reddy's hobbies include walking and mainly reading. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife of 37 years and they have two daughters. His daughters live on the West Coast, in Silicon Valley, California. He visits his native country once a year, his seven brothers and sister live near Bangalore. Today, this brilliant scientist is among the most respected names in the US in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence.

Prafulla Chandra Roy

Prafulla Chandra Roy was a Bengali academician, who spoke of entrepreneurship and himself showed that way. He was born on August 2, 1861 and died on June 16, 1944. He was a chemist and founded Bengal Chemicals.

Satyendra Nath Bose

Satyendra Nath Bose (January 1, 1894 - February 4, 1974) was a Bengali Indian physicist, specializing in mathematical physics. Bose was born in Kolkata (Calcutta), the eldest of seven children. His father, Surendranath Bose, worked in the Engineering Department of the East India Railway. He knew many languages and also could play Esraj (a musical instrument similar to violin) very well. Bose attended Hindu High School in Calcutta, and later attended Presidency College, also in Calcutta, earning the highest marks at each institution. From 1916 to 1921 he was a lecturer in the physics department of Calcutta University. In 1921, he joined the physics department of the then recently founded Dacca University (now called University of Dhaka), again as a lecturer. In 1926 he became a professor and was made head of the physics department, and continued teaching at Dacca University until 1945. At that time he returned to Calcutta, and taught at Calcutta University until 1956, when he retired and was made professor emeritus.Although more than one Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of the boson, Bose was not awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery or for his famous Bose-Einstein statistics. While at the University of Dhaka, Bose wrote a short article called 'Planck's Law and the Hypothesis of Light Quanta', describing the photoelectric effect and based on a lecture he had given on the ultraviolet catastrophe. During this lecture, in which he had intended to show his students that theory predicted results not in accordance with experimental results, Bose made an embarrassing statistical error which gave a prediction that agreed with observations, a contradiction. Since the coins are distinct, there are two outcomes which produce a head and a tail. The probability of two heads is one-fourth. The error was a simple mistake that would appear obviously wrong to anyone with a basic understanding of statistics, and similar to arguing that flipping two fair coins will produce two heads one-third of the time. However, it produced correct results, and Bose realized it might not be a mistake at all. He for the first time held that the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution would not be true for microscopic particles where fluctuations due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle will be significant. Thus he stressed in the probability of finding particles in the phase space each having volumes h^f and discarding the distinct position and momentum of the particles. Physics journals refused to publish Bose's paper. Discouraged, he wrote to Albert Einstein, who immediately agreed with him. Bose had earlier translated Einstein's theory of General Relativity from German to English. It is said that Bose had taken Albert Einstein as his Guru (the mentor). Because photons are indistinguishable from each other, one cannot treat any two photons having equal energy as being different from each other. By analogy, if the coins in the above example behaved like photons and other bosons, the probability of producing two heads would indeed be one-third. Bose's "error" is now called Bose-Einstein statistics. Einstein adopted the idea and extended it to atoms. From this, the duo predicted the existence of phenomena which became known as Bose-Einstein condensate, a dense collection of bosons (which are particles with integer spin, named after Bose), which was proven to exist by experiment in 1995. Bose's ideas were afterward well received in the world of physics, and he was granted leave from the University of Dacca to travel to Europe in 1924. He spent a year in Paris and worked with Marie Curie, and met several other well-known scientists. He then spent another year abroad, working with Einstein in Berlin. Upon his return to Dhaka, he was made a professor in 1926. He did not have a doctorate, and so ordinarily he would not be qualified for the post, but Einstein recommended him. His work ranged from X-ray crystallography to grand unified theories. He together with Meghnad Saha published an equation of state for real gases. Apart from physics he did some research in biochemistry and literature (Bengali, English). He made deep studies in chemistry, geology, zoology, anthropology, engineering and other sciences. Being of Bengali origin he devoted a lot of time to promoting Bengali as a teaching language, translating scientific papers into it, and promoting the development of the region. In 1944 Bose was elected General President of the Indian Science Congress. In 1958 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (June 29, 1893-June 28, 1972) was an Indian scientist and applied statistician. He is best known for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure. He did pioneering work on anthropometric variation in India. He founded the Indian Statistical Institute, and contributed to large scale sample surveys. His father, Prabodh Chandra, was an active member of the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. His mother, Nirodbasini, belonged to a family of considerable academic achievements. He graduated in Physics in 1912 from the Presidency College, Kolkata and completed Tripos at King's College, Cambridge. He then returned to Calcutta. Inspired by the Biometrika and mentored by Acharya Brajendranath Seal he started his statistical work. Initially he worked on analyzing university exam results, anthropometric measurements on Anglo-Indians of Calcutta and some metrological problems. He also worked as a meteorologist for some time. In 1924, when he was working on the probable error of results of agricultural experiments, he met Ronald Fisher, with whom he established a life-long friendship. He also worked on schemes to prevent floods. His most important contributions are related to large scale sample surveys. He introduced the concept of pilot surveys and advocated the usefulness of sampling methods. His name is also associated with the scale free multivariate distance measure, the Mahalanobis distance. He founded the Indian Statistical Institute on 17 December, 1931.

In later life, he contributed prominently to newly independent India's five-year plans starting from the second. His variant of Wassily Leontief's Input-output model was employed in the second and later plans to work towards rapid industrialisation of India and with his colleagues at his institute, he played a key role in developing the required statistical infrastructure. He also had an abiding interest in cultural pursuits and served as secretary to Rabindranath Tagore, particularly during the latter's foreign travels, and also his alma mater Visva Bharati University, for some time.He received one of the highest civilian awards Padma Vibhushan from the Government of India for his contribution to science and services to the country. He died on Jun 28, 1972, a day before his seventy-ninth birthday. Even at this age, he was still active doing research work and discharging his duties as the Secretary and Director of the Indian Statistical Institute and as the Honorary Statistical Advisor to the Cabinet of the Government of India. He had got Weldon Medal from Oxford University in 1944 and Padma Vibhushan in 1968. He was also elected a fellow of the Royal Society, London in 1945 and Honorary President of International Statistical Institute in 1957.

Dr. Subhash Mukhopadhyay

Dr Subhash Mukhopadhyay (died June 19, 1981) was an Indian physician from Calcutta in India. He was educated at the Scottish Church College and later, at the Calcutta Medical College which was then affiliated to the University of Calcutta. His life and death has been the subject of countless newspaper reviews and a Bollywood film directed by Tapan Sinha entitled Ek Doctor Ki Maut (Death of a physician). He created history when he became the first physician in India (and second in the world after British physicians Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards) to perform the first In vitro fertilization resulting in a test tube baby "Durga" (alias Kanupriya Agarwal) on October 3, 1978.

Facing social ostracization, bureaucratic negligence, reprimand and insult instead of recognition from the Marxist West Bengal government and refusal of the Government of India to allow him to attend international conferences, he committed suicide in his Calcutta residence in 1980. His feat has been given belated recognition as the Indian physician who in 1986 was "officially" regarded as being the first doctor to perform in-vitro fertilization in India. His reinstatement to glory is attributable to Professor TC Anand Kumar who is credited to be the mastermind behind India's second (officially the first) test-tube baby. Professor Kumar took the crown off his own head after reviewing personal notes of Dr. Subhash Mukhopadhyay. He was ably helped by Professor Sunit Mukherji, who was a one-time colleague of Dr. Mukhopadhyay. Professor Kumar is currently active in setting up a research institute in reproductive biology in memory of Dr. Mukhopadhyay

Birbal Sahni

Birbal Sahni, FRS (1891-1949) was an Indian paleobotanist who studied the fossils of the Indian subcontinent. He founded what is today the Birbal Sahni Botanical Institute in Lucknow, India. Birbal Sahni was born on 14th November 1891 and got his early education in India at Lahore and graduated from Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1914. He later studied under Professor A. C. Seward, and was awarded the D.Sc. degree of London University in 1919. He returned to India and served as Professor of Botany at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi and Punjab University for about a year. In 1921, he was appointed as the first Professor and Head of the Botany Department of the Lucknow University. The University of Cambridge recognized his researches by the award of the degree of Sc. D. in 1929. During the following years he not only continued his investigations but collected around him a group of devoted students from all parts of the country and built up a reputation for the University which soon became the first Center for botanical and palaeobotanical investigations in India. He established the Institute of Palaeobotany under the aegis of The Palaeobotanical Society on 10th September, 1946 which initially functioned in the Botany Department of Lucknow University but later moved to its present premises at 53 University Road, Lucknow in 1949. On 3rd April, 1949 the Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru laid down the foundation stone of the new building of the Institute, however, a week later, on 10th April 1949, Professor Sahni succumbed to a heart attack. Professor Sahni was recognized by several academies and institutions in India and abroad for his research. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London (FRS) in 1936, the highest British scientific honor, awarded for the first time to an Indian botanist.

His greatest contribution was the discovery of a new group of fossil gymnosperms which he called the "Pentoxyleae". Sahni studied fossil leaves of Ptilophyllum, stem of Bucklandia and flower of Williamsonia and concluded that they all belong to the same plant which he reconstructed and named as Williamsonia sewardiana. He was elected Vice-President, Palaeobotany section, of 5th and 6th International Botanical Congress 1930 and 1935, respectively; General President of the Indian Science Congress for 1940; President, National Academy of Sciences, India, 1937-1939 and 1943-1944. In 1948 he was elected a foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Another high honor came to him was his election as an Honorary President of the International Botanical Congress, Stockholm in 1950.