Maverick Indian scientist Sujoy Guha sounds like an interesting chap:
Guha was a member of IIT’s fifth entering class, in 1957 — attending school where his uncle, a radical writer, had been imprisoned years earlier. After Guha reached retirement age in 2002, he returned to Kharagpur from Delhi. Driving around campus today in his 1967 Fiat sedan, Guha points out buildings that he has reclaimed from the jungle and retrofit with labs and workshops — a kind of rogue operation within the university walls. A former mining department building now serves as a RISUG production facility, where his staff mixes up batches of the polymer used in the procedure.
Besides RISUG, Guha is also developing an artificial heart based not on a human heart but on that of a cockroach, which has 13 chambers. His artificial version has five chambers in its left ventricle, which allows it to step up pressure more gradually, inflicting less stress on the mechanism and materials than a conventional design. In another building on campus, he is raising goats that will eventually receive the experimental hearts.
A birdlike man with clear, olive-toned skin and an elegant manner, Guha seems to have been transported from another century. In a sense, he was: Born in 1940, before independence, he still uses Britishisms like see here and good man. He doesn’t waste oxygen on small talk, so when he does speak you know to listen. Nevertheless, he has a lively sense of humor, and when something amuses him he’ll burst into a delighted, high-pitched laugh. At age 70, he still does not need glasses, which he attributes to his daily eye exercises. Every night, he jogs 2 miles around the IIT campus carrying a rolled-up belt to ward off stray dogs. “Every part of the body must be exercised,” he says.
Guha has a penchant for simple yet profound inventions. As a young graduate student at St. Louis University during the mid-1960s, he devised an electromagnetic pump that had no moving parts; instead, it used the ionic charge of seawater to create force. As he explained to a visiting reporter from Popular Science, his pump could also serve as a silent engine for ships — or nuclear submarines. A version of that electromagnetic “caterpillar drive” is, of course, at the center of the film The Hunt for Red October. As has happened with medical discoveries from penicillin to Viagra, Guha was searching for something entirely different when he stumbled across the idea that became RISUG. In the early 1970s, at the behest of the government, Guha was looking for a way to purify water in rural pumps. Treating the water chemically could be too expensive and infrastructure-dependent; he needed a method that was permanent, safe, and cheap. Then a hotshot young professor at the IIT campus in Delhi, Guha figured out a way to line the pumps with a substance that would kill bacteria without depleting itself.
But the project was never completed. In the mid-1970s, India awoke to its urgent population crisis, and the government’s priorities changed. Guha refocused his work on the field of contraception. He soon realized that the same basic concept could work inside the pumping mechanism of the male anatomy — the vas deferens.
His RISUG technology has evolved into a revolutionary new birth control method for men. (You may not appreciate the accompanying video.)