Business

Saturday July 18, 2009

Up close and personal with Dr K. Harikrishna

By ERROL OH


MADHUR Jaffrey is not in the ilk of TV’s young and alluring domestic goddesses such as Nigella Lawson, Padma Lakshmi and Giada De Laurentiis, but if ever there was a vote to name a patron saint of the culinarily challenged, she would get an aye from Sime Darby Bhd scientist K. Harikrishna.

After all, a cookbook written by Madhur helped Hariskrishna woo a pretty girl he fancied, back when they were both graduate students in England in the late 1980s.

They met at a party and discovered that they shared a passion for food. He offered to cook a meal for her although he was not the quite sort who knew his way around the kitchen. “My grandma had tried teaching me, but it had never worked out very well,” he recalls.

Help came in the form of Madhur’s easy-to-follow recipes. To Harikrishna, they were like instructions for experiments. It was about faithfully following the prescribed steps to get the desired results. He declares: “The book can make any idiot, including myself, into a chef.”

The plan was to cook northern Indian dishes – “tandoori chicken and all kinds of stuff”. The purchase of the cookbook pretty much took care of that part. Next came the task of actually asking the girl over. He needed another nudge in the right direction, but it didn’t come from Madhur.

Says Harikrishna: “My flatmates and I were all in the same lab, and every day they were bending my ears about me following up on the date. And I’d always say: ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow.’ Eventually, they grabbed hold of me and said: ‘Look, if you don’t go there, we’ll go there.’

So he trudged over to her lab, approached an acquaintance and asked: “I’m looking for Jennifer. Can you direct me to her bench?” “Yes, she’s standing next to you,” came the reply. She had changed her hair colour and Harikrishna hadn’t recognised her. She heard the exchange, of course. So did everybody at the lab, who had come closer, expecting something interesting to happen. They were not disappointed.

After the embarrassment had receded, the invitation was issued and accepted. They had their meal together and she was impressed.

They got married not long after that, and they now have two daughters. Concludes Harikrishna: “The way to a woman’s heart is through the stomach, not the other way round.”

Actually, the more likely moral of the story is that one should embrace challenges. That’s part of Harikrishna’s job.

As head of Sime Darby Technology Centre Sdn Bhd, the research and development (R&D) unit of Sime Darby’s plantation division, he spearheads the conglomerate’s exploration of new technological frontiers.

The giant and the genome

He was in the spotlight in May when Sime Darby announced that it had mapped the oil palm genome. The plantation giant touted this as a “scientific breakthrough”. More significantly, it said it would use the data to breed oil palms that would eventually double crude palm oil yields.

Sime Darby collaborated with other companies and scientists on the genome project, and indeed, several people were identified as key figures when the company made public the achievement.

Nevertheless, Harikrishna, 48, played a central role as the homegrown talent who fast-tracked a technically demanding project.

Not bad for a guy who at 15, was sent to Britain because his parents – dad was a doctor and mum taught maths and biology – feared that he would never qualify for a place to study medicine locally, judging from his poor performance in school in Kuala Lumpur.

He says: “I was relaxing all the time. My parents were pulling their hair out. Being a parent now, I understand what it was like. I tortured them like hell. I was not doing well in school because mediocrity was great, you see.”

Despite the expensive education, Harikrishna failed his A-levels; entrance into medical school remained a remote possibility. However, his parents refused to give up on him. “My father realised that I really hadn’t a clue as to how to study. I was trying but I didn’t have an effective way of studying,” he remembers.

Dad taught him to take notes and to test himself on what he had read. Also, dad got him at Brighton Technical College Higher National Diploma (HND) course in applied biology. The combination of morning lectures and afternoon practical classes brought Harikrishna to a turning point.

“Suddenly, I could relate all the practical stuff to the lectures. Before, I had understood the theory but I couldn’t figure out how to do the various things in practice. After a while, I decided that this practical stuff was cool and great fun. I ended up being the top student in the college,” he says.

With the HND in hand, he could finally take the path towards becoming a doctor. He decided not to apply for medicine because his father had told him that it was all about mugging.

“I can’t take things at face value. I always have to ask questions. I pull things apart and put them together again, to figure out how they work. For me, understanding something is more important than rote learning. I decided that medicine didn’t excite me,” he explains.

A new fascination takes root

Instead, he opted to study plant sciences at Wye College, which was the agricultural arm of the University of London.

“Animals respond in the same way every time; you poke them and they jump up and down. Every time you cucuk (stimulate) a plant, it will respond differently (than at other times) because it is slightly different at that point. This is because of the environment it’s in, the amount of water it has, and so on,” he says.

“Animals can run away from stress. If it’s too hot outside, we can find shade. We’re mobile. Therefore, we’re more consistent. Plants can’t perform that way because the environment they live in is ever-changing. They have to have a whole battery of mechanisms in place to allow them to deal with those changes. This makes them very fascinating to me.”

At Wye, he was again a top student. “Those days, the classes were small. So, I was best out of 14... before you get too excited,” he points out. The learning didn’t stop there. He went to the University of Leicester to obtain a PhD in plant molecular and developmental biology.

Next, he and Jennifer (currently, an associate professor at Universiti Malaya’s Institute of Biological Sciences) moved to the United States because in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, there was not much money in science.

They did post-doctoral work and had a good time in California. “Everything was bigger, better and shinier in the US,” says Harikrishna. But Malaysia (and an anxious father) beckoned, and in November 1991, he became a biotechnologist with Golden Hope Plantations Bhd, working mostly on oil palm tissue culture.

Three years later, he decided he wanted to do more with his skills. He took a pay cut and joined Universiti Pertanian Malaysia (now Universiti Putra Malaysia). It was his way of giving something back.

“Not many people have the privilege of having the kind of education I have. After having this kind of exposure and then coming back here, I felt that I had to contribute because those who go to local universities don’t have rich parents. I guess I’m a bit of a socialist,” he explains.

“I didn’t earn much money as a university lecturer but I got immense pleasure and satisfaction from teaching these young guys and girls because of their inquiring minds and potential. They were bright. They just needed the right spark to go to the next level.”

Growing the economy through science

The urge to do more, to make a difference, began gnawing away and after eight years in public higher education, Harikrishna was ready to go back to the private sector. Sime Darby came along.

The then director of research Dr Abdul Kadir Mohamed interviewed him in 2003, with the intention of hiring him to lead the company’s move into biotechnology research.

He recalls: “I asked him ‘What is it that you want to achieve?’ He turned it around and asked me: ‘What do you want to achieve?’ ”

On that day, the notion of him steering a project to sequence, assemble and annotate the oil palm genome, was probably not on his mind, but it was precisely the kind of work he was yearning to do.

When asked how he feels about being in charge of the genome project, considering its potentially massive impact, he says: “It’s my dream. I told Datuk Azhar (Abdul Hamid, the Sime Darby plantation boss) – ‘Now you can cremate me.’ Anything after this is a bonus.”

He adds that he accepted the Sime Darby job offer not so much because of the money, but because it would give him the opportunity to use science to make big-picture changes.

“I’m a scientist. I’ve been trained most of my life to be a scientist. I want people to recognise that science can make big contributions to the economy of this country. We need to translate that scientific potential into action and deliverables.

“It’s great to be at Sime Darby because we can start converting the sciencespeak into bottomline components. Of course, it’s a long journey.

“What is exciting is that by expanding the technology base and the economic cake, you’re creating new job opportunities for new generations of Malaysian, who can have bigger and different dreams.”

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