In 1982, while still a resident in internal medicine at Government Medical College, Nagpur, Siddhartha Kumar Biswas designed a new biopsy needle for kidney and liver biopsies. He filed for a patent. The Government of India granted it. His professor, Dr. B.S. Chaubey, was impressed enough to ask his residents to begin using it. Siddhartha was, at the time, in his twenties, working in a government teaching hospital in Nagpur. Kolkata \u2014 where he would eventually build one of that city’s most recognised neurology practices \u2014 was still a decade away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Siddhartha was born in Calcutta \u2014 it was still Calcutta then \u2014 to a father who served as Divisional Medical Officer with Central Railway, Nagpur, and a mother who was a homemaker. The railway posting brought the family to Nagpur, and Siddhartha grew up there, attending Bishop Cotton School from 1965 to 1971. He did his premedical year at Shri Mathuradas Mohota College of Science \u2014 part of a group of 13 or 14 Mohota students who entered GMC Nagpur in 1973, a cohort that included Harshvardhan Sheorey, Vilas Tambe, Arvind Dani, Hari Paranjape, Uday Kanhere, C.L. Sonkusare, and others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He graduated from GMC Nagpur \u2014 bagging the gold medal in Preventive and Social Medicine in the final MBBS in the winter of 1977 \u2014 and completed his internship at the primary health centre in Tirora with Sharad Jaitly and Abhimanyu Kapgate, followed by an urban internship at GMC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His MD thesis at GMC Nagpur, under Dr. B.S. Chaubey’s supervision, examined the role of prophylactic antibiotics in preventing urinary tract infections in women. It was solid, careful work. But what defined the residency was the needle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Siddhartha designed the biopsy needle not because he was asked to, but because he saw a problem and worked out a solution. Kidneys fascinated him; the instrument available at the time evidently did not satisfy him. Dr. Chaubey recognised an inventive intelligence when he saw one, and put the needle to use. The patent followed. It is the kind of early signal \u2014 the resident who does not just pass examinations but makes something \u2014 that separates a certain type of doctor from the rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He secured first rank in DM (Neurology) from Bombay University in 1985. His DM thesis, at Grant Medical College, Mumbai, under Dr. B.S. Singhal’s guidance, investigated autonomic nervous system function in Guillain-Barr\u00e9 syndrome. By the time he left Mumbai, he held an MD, a DM, a gold medal, a patent, and a first rank. He was ready for Kolkata.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kolkata in the mid-1980s was not short of neurologists. It had medical colleges, teaching hospitals, established consultants. Moving there to set up a private practice required either confidence or stubbornness, and Siddhartha appears to have had both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He served as Associate Professor of Neurology at the Institute of Child Health, Kolkata, from 1986 to 2000 \u2014 a 14-year academic appointment that gave his practice both credibility and continuity. He joined Belle Vue Clinic as Chief Consultant Neurologist in 1986. Over the years he added visiting appointments at the Calcutta Medical Research Institute (1990), Duncan Gleneagles Hospital \u2014 later Apollo Gleneagles \u2014 (1997), and the Institute of Neurosciences (2009). He founded his Neurology Clinic in 1991, established Biswas Neurology Clinic Private Limited in 2019, and has published more than 30 research papers in national and international journals. He reviews for more than ten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The clinic at 201 Sarat Bose Road is now a known address in Kolkata neurology. Patients come for the usual catalogue of neurological illness \u2014 and for the unusual ones, the cases that other physicians have not been able to place, the rare conditions that require a doctor who has read widely and thinks carefully.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Siddhartha’s wife Sujata holds a BSc, MSc, and PhD in Biochemistry and runs Kolkata Pathological Centre. Their elder daughter Debjani completed her BS and MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and works as a Senior Software Engineer at Oracle in Boston; she is married to Dr. Wolfgang Richter, who holds a PhD in Computer Sciences from Carnegie Mellon and heads Infrastructure and Cyber-Security at SOROCO. Their younger daughter Indrani is an MBBS graduate from Kolkata. They have a granddaughter, Anuradha.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A man who designs a biopsy needle in his twenties and patents it does not stop being curious at thirty. Siddhartha Kumar Biswas has spent four decades in neurology \u2014 a field that, as he has watched it change from the inside, has moved from clinical observation and lumbar punctures to molecular medicine and gene therapy. He has stayed current with all of it. The resident who filed the patent became the consultant other physicians call when they have run out of explanations. That trajectory, from the wards of GMC Nagpur to the clinic on Sarat Bose Road, was set early.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"