Remembering

Abstract

Prakash Shetty passed away on 3rd September 2018, leaving a sad void for his many students, friends and admirers. He started his professional life in Christian Medical College (CMC) Vellore, India where he completed his undergraduate and postgraduate education. His classmate, Abraham Joseph reflected; “Prakash was one of the outstanding students of our class, he was the recipient of several prizes throughout his student career, and was greatly respected by his classmates. He had an inquisitive mind and at times his questions would embarrass the teacher who had no answer. This quest for knowledge was not just to pass examinations with distinction, but to really understand the functioning of the human body”. His teacher, P Zachariah wrote; “I was delighted when Prakash sought to specialise in Physiology by joining the then fledgling MD program. He got his MD in 1972, and in doing so, gave a flying start to the postgraduate program in Physiology at CMC. Even at that point his keenness to teach, and teach very effectively, was obvious”. He was much admired by his students there. Shiv Pillai, his former student, recounts “we first connected with Prakash Shetty when we were second year medical students and he was a young faculty member in the Physiology department. He was an inspirational and accessible mentor, whose passion for science, for biomedical research and for life in general, was infectious. Apart from a deep intellectual interest in all things scientific, Prakash was a renaissance man—very knowledgeable about culture, literature, classical music, history and food”. After he moved to St. Johns Medical College in Bangalore, students there also remembered their first electric experiences with him as their lecturer in Physiology. An exceptionally gifted teacher, he communicated his passion for the subject with a style that almost seemed extempore, and his students hung on to his every word. It was St John’s however that his work on nutrition began to take shape. He was critical of the belief at the time, that energy requirements were astonishingly low in developing countries, and that adults in these countries appeared able to undertake feats of physical endurance on much lower energy intakes than would be expected [1]. His initial studies on energy intake in undernourished adults at St John’s led Prakash to the Dunn Clinical Nutrition Centre in Cambridge, on a Nehru Scholarship from the Indian Government. There he pursued a PhD on human thermogenesis with Philip James, who remained a valued friend and collaborator over the years, and even supervised Prakash’s students in their postdoctoral fellowships. That was a time of great interest in energy expenditure, and whether a possible defect (or an adaptation) in energy expenditure resulted in obesity. Many colleagues embraced the idea which was mainly based on data obtained in obese animals. Roland Jung, Prakash Shetty and Philip James were one of the first authors providing human evidence for this idea [2]; a landmark paper. In addition they went beyond those observations to try and explain that adaptation as a specific action of catecholamines’. This was another landmark paper by the group [3]. Besides other scientific interests, Prakash retained this line of investigation for many years. In 1999, he (together with other leading scientists of that time) had published an outstanding review on metabolic adaptation to low energy intakes [4]. This work was also part of a Report of the International Dietary Energy Consultative Group Working Group (IDECG) [5]. * A. V. Kurpad a.kurpad@sjri.res.in