While the world stood up to salute Robert Edwards, acknowledging his ground breaking work in in-vitro fertilization by bestowing the Nobel Prize on him, another pioneer of this field remained largely forgotten: Subhash Mukherjee, an Indian physician-scientist, based in Kolkata, West Bengal, part of a team comprising of Cryobiologist Sunit Mukherji and Gynecologist Dr. Saroj Kanti Bhattacharya, who managed to create India‟s first (and the world's second) "test tube baby" just 67 days after Robert Edwards, Patrick Steptoe and their team made the landmark breakthrough.
Dr. Subhash Mukherjee was born on January 16, 1931, in Hazaribagh, Bihar (now in Jharkhand), India. He showed exceptional academic prowess from an early age, obtaining a degree in Physiology from the University of Calcutta and in 1958 earned his first PhD in Reproductive Physiology under the mentorship of Dr. Sachchidananda Banerjee from the Rajabazar Science College. He went on to earn a second PhD, again in the field of Reproductive Biology, from the Clinical Endocrinology Research Institute at the University of Edinburgh under the mentorship of Prof. John A. Loraine in 1967. His work centered on an innovative assay for measuring LH. He also served at the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, during this period.
Dr. Subhash Mukherjee (Wikipedia)
