GR Chandak, has been appointed as the Director, Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics (CDFD), Hyderabad, under the Department of Biotechnology. A group leader at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology,  Chandak received his MD in Biochemistry from Benaras Hindu University and PhD from Osmania University.

His research interests include genetic understanding of complex disorders of pancreas,  type 2 diabetes etc.  His group has identified novel genes associated with chronic pancreatitis and showed its genetic basis to be different in Indians from that in the Europeans. He has published close to 80 articles in peer-reviewed journals including Nature, Nature  Genetics, Lancet etc. He is a member of Science Akademi’s and an Adjunct Group  Leader at Genome Institute of Singapore.

Did You Know?

• Biotechnology is a set of techniques by which human beings modify living things or use them as tools.
• The discovery in 1953 of the structure of DNA by Francis Crick (b. 1916) and James Watson (b. 1928) is but one key step in the story of molecular biology.
• Dolly was a female domestic sheep, and the first animal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell, using the process of nuclear transfer.
• The name of World’s first cloned buffalo is ‘Garima’ and it was successfully cloned by National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI).
• On Jnauary 2015, the second cloned buffalo Garima II gave birth to a calf and it was named Mahima.