From cancer to comic strips – Bangladeshi researcher turns science into art

From cancer to comics, from scientist to artist, from MIT to IIT – it’s been an unusual journey for Bengali boy Argha Manna, who spent part of his childhood peering through the microscope but later realized it was more fun to spread science through graphic arts.

On Saturday (November 15, 2025), this trained biologist will lead a workshop in the city, History in Comics, teaching enthusiasts the methods of researching, reimagining and creating a visual story. “Art and science inspire each other and are strongly linked. It was only in the 19th century that we separated them as disciplines. From the time of Leonardo da Vinci to William Turner, there was no boundary. Da Vinci himself was a brilliant scientist and engineer,” said 38-year-old Mr Manna. The Hindu.

“William Turner was a close friend of Michael Faraday, and many of his atmospheric watercolors were inspired by science (Turner and the scientists by James Hamilton is one of my favorite books). There are many examples in human history where the marriage of art and science has created new knowledge, pushing humanity to the next level,” he said.

This boy from Liluah, near Howrah resident, joined the Bose Institute in Calcutta as a researcher in cancer biology in 2009, but dropped out of the program in 2015 without completing a degree. The reason? That year marked the hundredth anniversary of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity Science magazine had marked the occasion with comic art. “It was kind of an ‘Aha!’ moment for me. I thought it would be a serious scientific journal Science could publish comic art, why couldn’t I do that? I had found my right calling,” said the scientist-artist.

“But this didn’t happen immediately. When I quit Bose Institute, I had to take up a job to pay my bills. I started working as a journalist at Ananda Bazar Patrika. I didn’t have good skills in drawing, but there I learned from the head illustrator, Suman Chaudhury, who became my school. I worked double shifts in the office for four years to learn art. In the mornings I was a journalist; in the evenings I learned how to cartoon, illustrate and learn fine techniques. art,” he said.

While working at the newspaper, he began creating comic art about the history of science. Recalling his fascination with microscopy, he sought to critically examine in the artwork how microscopy, as a tool, revolutionized science.

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of his comic artworks was released, Be aware of drops and bubblespublished in the Annals of Internal Medicinesparked interest in the scientific community and soon after earned a fellowship from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s when my artistic career started to take shape. I got a call from MIT and started collaborating with Prof. Lydia Bourouiba on the history of disease transmission, with an emphasis on airborne diseases. I left the conventional way of publishing science and my project asked critical questions and documented paradigm shifts in disease transmission research through comics – graphic nonfiction,” said Mr. Manna.

In late 2022, a job offer from IIT Gandhinagar brought him back to India, but he has also maintained his connection with MIT, returning there every summer to work on a book project. Therefore, he currently holds a dual title: Artist-in-Residence (IIT Gandhinagar) and Research Affiliate (MIT).

“During my PhD days, I enjoyed seeing what was happening at the microscopic level. I never thought that my love for images would draw me to art. I felt deeply that nowadays science becomes deeply technical and the philosophical part is ignored. I wanted to express scientific knowledge, the development of science and the history of science outside of academic contexts,” Mr. Manna summarized his work. “I don’t believe in unidirectional knowledge dissemination or monologue lectures. I see the workshop as a collaborative space in which we will have dialogues, ask critical questions and draw stories together.”