Vamsi Mootha had nothing on his mind but his new job as assistant professor at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Then he answered a call on his cell phone in the last week of September, and got a no-strings-attached offer of $500,000.   

"The conversation lasted a few minutes but it looked like it was going on for hours," Mootha, 33, then an assistant professor of systems biology at Harvard, said. "It took me some time to realise it was not a prank call, and that I was getting the MacArthur 'Genius' Award."

The only condition was, he could not talk about it until the date of the official announcement, a week later.

"I was told that if the news leaked out, I would not get the grant," Mootha said. "I am not very good at keeping secrets. But this one, I kept to myself. My older brother Ravi who had come to visit me, was about to return to Texas. I had to persuade him to stay with me till the day of the official announcement. I wanted him to be with me on that day."

September 28, the day his enforced silence was over, he called his parents Venkataramana Rao Mootha, a doctor, and Vasantha Mootha, a homemaker, in Beaumont, Texas.

The call to winners 'can be life-changing, coming as it does out of the blue,' said Jonathan F Fanton, President, MacArthur Foundation. 'It offers highly creative women and men the gift of time and the unfettered opportunity to explore, create, and contribute.'

The Foundation is the absolute authority in picking recipients of its annual grant. There are, Mootha points out, no nominations; the composition of the selection panel is never revealed.

The John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation has been giving out the 'genius' fellowships for 24 years to celebrate creative and undiscovered thinkers in fields ranging from music to magic to economics to medicine and pottery.

At least 1,000 achievers draw the Foundation's attention each year. As one of America's largest private philanthropic bodies, the $4 billion MacArthur Foundation has awarded over $3 billion in grants since 1978.

The first Indian American to get the grant was A K Ramanujan (1983), the poet who taught at the University of Chicago. He was followed by sarod maestro Ustad Ali Akbar Khan (1991) and pioneering MIT economist Sendhil Mullainathan (2002), who at 29 was the youngest recipient that year. Mootha is this year's third youngest awardee.

The Foundation noted how, early this year, Mootha and fellow researchers reported a discovery that suggests a new treatment for adult-onset diabetes after their discovery of a gene that revs up the energy-producing ability of muscle cells. He studies mitochondria, the power plants of biological cells.

Mootha is converting the 'promise of new technologies such as genomics and proteomics into tangible, important insights regarding basic biological processes and the sources of human diseases,' the Foundation noted.

He was honored for pioneering 'powerful, adaptable computational strategies for mining data collected in laboratories throughout the world, providing an efficient means to hunt down gene interactions that lead to a wide variety of diseases.'

"I do not follow the orthodox way," Mootha said, of the way he thinks and works. "The traditional way to do biology was to study one protein at a time. What these new tools allow us to do is to monitor all proteins, or all genes encoding mitochondria, in a single experiment. Genomics is sort of allowing a global biology."

He was six months old when his parents migrated to America from Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, along with his three older siblings.

"Being the youngest has some advantages," he said. "There is far less pressure on you compared to your older siblings." The youngest can think of going into different directions than his siblings, he points out.

When he was very young, he wanted to be a surgeon like his father, but at school his mathematical talent drew the attention of Beaumont Professor George Berzsenyi at a science fair. Berzsenyi encouraged Vamsi to sharpen his math skills. 

While his siblings pursued medicine, Vamsi Mootha went on to study mathematics at Stanford.

"I did well at Stanford. I wondered what I should do after graduation," he recalled. His choices were a master's degree as a prelude to a career in Silicon Valley, or a move to Wall Street. What he knew for sure, by the time he was heading to complete his BS degree, was that he would not pursue a higher degree in math.

"I did not have the special gift [Srinivasa] Ramanujan had," he said. "I had enjoyed a biology course I had taken at Stanford, and decided I would be better off being a doctor or a researcher."

When he received his medical degree from Harvard, he made another big decision. Instead of preparing to practice medicine, he decided to do research. "I guess since three of my siblings — not to forget my father — practice medicine, I thought I will do something different."

Mootha, who combines clinical medicine and genomics and computing with a dedication to understanding the complex world of energy metabolism, and to work on tools to battle diabetes, says he will probably use the grant money to study rare metabolic disorders that could shed light on more common illnesses.

This feature first appeared as the lead feature in the October 8 issue of India Abroad, the newspaper owned by rediff.com

Image: Dominic Xavier

Photo courtesy: MacArthur Foundation