The search engine giant Google, today honours a woman who makes the country proud. And the woman is Asima Chatterjee, Google marks a doodle to celebrate as well as to remember her, on the occasion of her 100th birthday.
Asima Chatterjee, an Organic chemist, paved the way for women in science and improved the needs of survival for patients with cancer, epilepsy, and malaria. And she is first woman to receive India’s most prestigious science award the annual Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar prize for her achievements in phytomedicine.
She born in 1917, in Calcutta (which is now called as kolkata), in a middle-class family. She completed a Masters degree in organic chemistry from the University of Calcutta in 1938, and then six years later, she became the first woman in India to earn a doctorate in science.
In her entire life, she researched on chemical compounds produced by plants from the Indian subcontinent. Asima’s work on a group of chemical compounds from the Madagascar periwinkle plant, called vinca alkaloids, contributed to the development of drugs which used in chemotherapy, which reduces the growth of cancer by preventing cells from dividing.
Moreover, she published around 400 papers and many volumes on Indian medicinal plants and their chemistry. After contributing this much to the world, Chatterjee died on November 22, 2006.
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