He worked in a lab so small & hot that his sweat would often ruin his notes. He did not build a bomb/a satellite, but he solved a puzzle that was killing millions. In 1959, from a Silo in Calcutta, Sambhunath De discovered the secret pump that drains human life. He is the father of ORS: the ghost behind the most successful medical intervention in history. He was nominated for the Nobel by the world’s greatest giants, yet he died in 1985 traveling by local bus, unrecognized by the very people whose children he had saved.
Born in 1915 in a small village in West Bengal, S.N. De did not come from a family of elite scientists. He worked at the Nil Ratan Sircar (NRS) Medical College, Calcutta. While elite scientists were building rockets, De was working in a tiny, cramped lab with barely any ventilation. He did not have high-end sensors. He used his own intuition & rudimentary tools to study how certain invisible forces acted on human cells.
S.N. De solved the mystery of Cholera, but in a way that was pure Fluid Physics & Biophysics. For a century, the world thought Cholera was a blood infection. In 1959, in his tiny lab, De proved it was a toxin that attacked the fluid-transport mechanisms of the gut. He discovered the Cholera Toxin (CT). He demonstrated how the toxin created a pump that sucked water out of cells, a masterclass in osmotic pressure & molecular transport.
This discovery is the direct reason why ORS (Oral Rehydration Salt) exists. If we/anyone we know has ever been saved by a packet of ORS, we owe our life to S.N. De.
In 1954, Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg wrote to the Nobel Committee saying that S.N. De’s work was worthy of the prize. He was nominated multiple times, but like many Indian scientists, he was a Ghost in a colony. The prize never came.
In 1978, the Nobel Foundation organized a symposium on Cholera. They realized the man who started it all, S.N. De, was still alive in Calcutta. They invited him, & he arrived at the high-end gala in a simple suit, looking like a retired clerk.
He was a man of aggressive humility. He lived in a small house, traveled by local buses, & never sought patents for his discovery. He wanted the Signal (the cure) to be free for the world. His own family knew him as a dedicated doc who went to the lab every day. They had no idea that Nobel Prize winners in Europe & America were referencing his 1959 paper as 1 of the most important scientific documents of the 20th century.
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