3:INTRODUCTION TO SASI’S ORIGINAL WORK
The pioneering DNA work that underpins ASDT and everything else on this site was conducted by Prof V Sasisekharan (Sasi) and his team, principally N Pattabiraman and G Gupta together with M Bansal, S Rao, S Brahmachari, K Samir, P Parrack, N Ramaswamy, S Datta, M Rajagopalan, M Conrad and K Majumder.
This body of work mainly published between 1976 and 1984 was initiated, directed and overseen by Sasi. It examined the component elements of the DNA molecule in a coherent and all encompassing way and at a level of detail that had not been attempted previously and has not been repeated since.
Their unique technical research work, initially supported in part by separate but exactly contemporary theoretical work from a team in New Zealand produced an alternative model of the DNA model, a side by side model (SBS). Their pioneering work may come to be recognised as some of the most important science laboratory research ever done.
Alternatively they may have made fundamental errors, their work may be flawed and their conclusions mistaken. People may have opinions about the validity of their work but no one can say for sure or rather on a scientific basis until or unless the work is repeated and either confirmed or refuted.
One of the aims of the two websites, this one and www.sidebysidedna.com is to introduce Sasi and his team’s work to anyone with a general interest. The sister site also brings a core element of Sasi’s work together in one place so that workers in the field some of whom may never have heard of SBS can access it easily.
The focus of this site is the hypothesised dynamic ASDT model of DNA which the author has proposed as a logical progression drawn from Sasi’s findings. While this site does that it has grown to present a new theoretical synthesis for the key alternative models of the molecule. Obviously neither the ASDT nor the proposed new synthesis begin to make any kind of sense without understanding Sasi’s work.
Ten of Sasi and his team’s core papers available on or linked from the sister site https://sidebysidedna.com are listed in the table immediately below and can be found on the other site in the pull down menu Sasisekharan Papers together with a letter to A Johnson from 1982, a list of all Sasi’s DNA papers and the list of his entire academic publishing record
Also listed in the table below and on the other site are the dissertation and PhD thesis by (now) Prof Terry Stokes in the Stokes Papers pull down. Then in the Johnson Material pull down there is the original 1981 UCL term paper or layman’s summary of Sasi’s work together with the same animation of the ASDT and a description of a DNA extraction procedure.
The point of both websites is to try and reopen the debate about this potentially enormously important departure and encourage someone, anyone to take up the challenge. First off someone must repeat Sasi’s research work to see if Sasi and his team are right or not and then to weigh the merits of the ASDT model, its connections to the other alternative structures and the overall bio-evolutionary framework. This could and should lead to huge and important new areas of research. The whole point of both sites is to engage proper scientific debate.
We would like to thank the publishers of Current Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Nucleic Acids Research, Journal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics, Social Studies of Science, University of Melbourne and Prof Terry Stokes for their kind permissions regarding the publication of the papers on the original www.sidebysidedna.com site.