Kamal Ranadive who was born on 8 November 1917 was an Indian biomedical

researcher who is known for her research in cancer about the links between cancers and
viruses. She was also the founding member of IWSA. Her parents were Dinesh
Dattatreya Samarth and Shantabai Dinkar Samarth.  Her father was a biologist who
taught in the Fergusson College, Pune. He ensured that all his children were well
educated. Kamal was a bright student. She had her schooling at the Huzurpaga: the
H.H.C.P. High School. Her father wanted her to study medicine. She did the otherwise
and started her college education at the Fergusson college with Botany and Zoology as
her main subjects. After her marriage she moved to Bombay and started working at the
Tata Memorial Hospital. She also did postgraduate studies in Cytology which was chosen
by her dad. After she received her Ph.D. from the University of Bombay in 1949, she was
encouraged by Khanolkar to seek a fellowship at an American University. She obtained
a postdoctoral research fellowship to work on tissue culture techniques and work
with George Gey (famous for his laboratory innovation, the HeLa cell line) in his
laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Later on, Kamal
returned to India, joined ICRC as a Senior Research Officer. She was instrumental in
establishing Experimental Biology Laboratory and Tissue Culture Laboratory in
Bombay. From 1966 to 1970 she had assumed the mantle of the Director of the Indian
Cancer Research Centre in an acting capacity. In the early 1960s, she along with her
assistants in the fields of biology and chemistry, developed tissue culture media and
related reagents. She was also responsible for establishing new research units
in Carcinogenesis, Cell biology and Immunology. Her research led to a further
appreciation of causes of diseases, such as leukaemia, breast cancer and Esophageal
Cancer. She was a great inspiration to Indian women scientists to work on cancer
research, in particular on the subject cancer among women and children. One such
project was on "Immunohematology of Tribal Blood" related to study of infants. Kamal
was awarded the Padma Bhushan (the third highest civilian award) for Medicine, in 1982.
In the 1960s, she established India's first tissue culture research laboratory at the Indian
Cancer Research Centre in Mumbai. Today we require such personalities in our society
since, the more the people commute, the more the diseases and viruses spread which can
be deadly. If more researches are conducted, it will result in the betterment of human
beings as well as it will help the human beings to evolve.