Kanpur gets mega lab in a ‘green’ house

He also wanted that the building itself become a model rather than just a bricks-and-mortar structure housing the facility. The entire exercise started in April 2002 and 64,000 square feet land was identified. The National Advisory Committee for IIT narrowed down the area of research to focus on — something that the IIT had been aspiring but never had the funds for — the fusion of biology with engineering.

And just a little over one year later, a building with the 16 research labs, two teaching labs, seminar hall, three service areas, autoclave, oven, basement and a cafeteria is ready. For ‘‘similar design vocabulary’’, the same architect firm that had designed the campus in the ’60s was assigned the job. The contractor was Omaxe, veterans in institutional design but new to the eco-friendly concept.

With TERI as one of the consultants, the building has been able to bring down its energy use by 40 per cent and nearly half the air-conditioning tonnage required.

When temperatures touch a scorching 50 degrees centigrade, this is how the insides would still be cool, naturally: The entire building has cavity walls that insulate it.

From the roof, the intake of heat has first been reduced by using china mosaic that reflects back 80 per cent of the heat. The rest is taken care of by a layer of thermocol and waterproofing.

A first for any institution, they have an earth-air tunnel system which is an outlet that sucks in the atmospheric air, transports it to a tunnel four metres below the earth’s surface for a specified time to cool it to 28 degrees and then pump it back into the interiors of the building.

‘‘Once the air is cool from the tunnel below and then backed by insulation where only a small part of the heat is coming in, the air-conditioning required is much less,’’ said Tanuja Kanvinde, the architect. Plus there are other features that cumulatively help in making this building more efficient — photovoltaic cells have been used to supplement energy requirements, maximum use of daylight and electricity saving tubelights and bulbs have been installed.

For a change, the Prime Minister will be inaugurating something that is up and running—‘‘We wanted that the programme should go on before the building came up. So the five-member faculty was hired, some of whom are best in their fields and equipment purchased,’’ said Sanjay Dhande, director, IIT.

Till tomorrow it is housed in another building. So once you enter the three-storyed Centre with a brick-tile facade into the arterium with tall skylights and the ‘‘hub’’ underneath with a gurgling fountain, you will find researchers and students on the glazed tile seats around the arterium.

But if you peek into any one of the labs with large glass windows on the side, you will see cutting-edge research in post-genome science. Pradip Sinha, the head of the department of this new facility, explains why this research is so important: ‘‘After sequencing of the genome, the entire collection of our book of life is staring at us, we only have to decipher it.’’

For the last one year, these scientists—who were earlier working in the best of labs around the world—have begun studying organisms similar to humans to find some answers to pressing questions like which gene is responsible for epilepsy, can cancer be cured by replacing a particular gene or is there a cure for encephalitis special to the Indian population.

To understand genome sequence better, they are studying tiny worms called C-Elegance and fruitfly. ‘‘There is work going on in India, but we, with our background in engineering and info technology, want to leapfrog in five years and go ahead of what has been done in the last 20 years,’’ said Sinha.

So where does MPLADS come in here? All the researchers have got top international grants like the Wellcome grant, thanks to the infrastructure provided by the MPLADS.

When working on their laser-powered confocal microscope, they do not forget to add that in each of their area of work, there was a Nobel prize last year.