Background
Bishnupada Mukerji was born on 1 March 1903 at Barrackpore in the North 24 Parganas district of the Indian state of West Bengal.
Bishnupada Mukerji was born on 1 March 1903 at Barrackpore in the North 24 Parganas district of the Indian state of West Bengal.
Bishnupada Mukerji did his early schooling at Barrackpore village school and Kolkata to pass the matriculation with a scholarship for further education . He passed the Intermediate examination from Scottish Church College, Kolkata with 13th rank in the University of Calcutta and joined the Calcutta Medical College to secure the degree of Bachelor of Medicine with first rank and honours in pharmacology, midwifery and Gynecology in 1927.
Bishnupada Mukerji did his residency under Green-Armytage at Eden Hospital for 18 months and moved to Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine where he worked under Sir Ram Nath Chopra who is reported to have successfully persuaded Mukerjee to turn to research by abandoning his medical practice.
In 1930, he took up the post of an assistant secretary to the Drug Enquiry Commission and assisted the commission in preparing a report advocating for drug standardization and pharmacy control. From 1931 to 1933, he worked at the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine on research on indigenous drugs when he received a Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation for research on vegetable drugs in China, America and Japan. Bishnupada Mukerji moved to Peking Union Medical College where he worked under renowned pharmacologist, H.B. Van Dyke. In 1936, he secured Doctor of Science from University of Michigan, the first doctoral degree awarded by the university in pharmacology.
Bishnupada Mukerji continued his studies at the University of London under Joshua Harold Burn, at the National Institute for Medical Research, Hampstead under Sir Henry Dale and at the University of Munich under Geheimrat professor W. Straub. In 1937, he returned to India to be reunited with Ram Nath Chopra at the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health in their newly formed Biochemical Standardization Laboratory and became the director of the institution in 1941 at Kolkata and later at Kasauli. In 1947, Bishnupada Mukerji was appointed as the director of Central Drugs Laboratory and held the dual responsibility of Pharmacognosy Laboratory as well for three years. During this period, when he put forward the concept of an exclusive laboratory for drug research, the CSIR took it up further to establish the Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI), Lucknow with assistance from Edward Mellanby and Mukerjee was appointed as the first permanent director of the institute.
Bishnupada Mukerji at CDRI till 1963 and moved to Chittaranjan National Cancer Research Centre, Kolkata as its director to hold the post till his retirement in 1968. Post retirement, he worked as a visiting lecturer and scientist at the Department of Biochemistry of the University of Calcutta and as a consultant to the Kolkata office of the Ford Foundation.
Bishnupada Mukerjee died on 30 July 1979, at the age of 76.