Cancer to comics — Bengal researcher makes art out of science

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 youth looking into microscopes but later realized that spreading science through graphic art was more fun.

On Saturday, November 15, 2025, this trained biologist will hold a workshop in the city: History in Comic Book Art, teaching enthusiasts how to research, reimagine and create a visual story. “Art and science inspire each other and are very interconnected. We only separated them as disciplines in the 19th century. From the time of Leonardo da Vinci until William Turner, there were no boundaries. Da Vinci himself was an excellent scientist and engineer,” said Mr. Manna, 38. Hindu.

“William Turner was a good friend of Michael Faraday, and many of his atmospheric watercolors were inspired by science (Turner and the Scientists One of my favorite reads by James Hamilton). “There are many examples in human history where the combination of art and science creates new knowledge and takes humanity to the next level,” he said.

Hailing from Liluah near Howrah, he joined the Bose Institute in Kolkata as a research fellow in cancer biology in 2009, but left the program in 2015 without accepting a degree. Why? That year was the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, and Science magazine celebrated the occasion with comic book art. “It’s kind of like ‘Aha!’ moment for me. I wish there was a serious scientific journal like this Science I could publish comics, why couldn’t I? “I found my right profession, scientist-artist,” he said.

“But that didn’t happen right away. Since I dropped out of Bose Institute, I had to get a job to pay my bills. I started working as a journalist in Ananda Bazar Patrika. I didn’t have good talent in drawing, but I learned it from the chief illustrator Suman Chaudhury, which was my school there. I did double shifts in the office for four years just to learn art. In the mornings, I was a journalist; in the evenings, I learned caricature, illustration and drawing techniques. Fine arts,” he said.

He began creating comic art on the history of science while working at the newspaper. Recalling his fascination with microscopy, he attempted to critically explore in his artwork how microscopy as a tool started a revolution in science.

In 2020, one of his comic book works during the Covid-19 epidemic Be Aware of Droplets and BubblesPublished on , Annals of Internal MedicineHe sparked interest in the scientific community and soon won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That’s when my artistic career began to take shape. I received a call from MIT and began working with Prof. Lydia Bourouiba on the history of disease transmission, focusing on airborne diseases. I abandoned the traditional way of publishing science and my project was to ask critical questions and document paradigm shifts in disease transmission research through comics (graphic nonfiction),” he said.

At the end of 2022, a job offer from IIT Gandhinagar brought him back to India, but he also maintained his association with MIT, returning there every summer to work on a book project. So now he has a twin title: Artist in Residence (IIT Gandhinagar) and Research Associate (MIT).

Mr. Manna summarized his work as follows: “During my doctoral years, I liked to see what was going on at the microscopic level. I never thought that my love for images would draw me to art. I deeply felt that science today has become extremely technical and the philosophical part is ignored. I wanted to express scientific knowledge, the development of science and the history of science beyond academic environments.” “I don’t believe in one-way dissemination of information or monologue lectures. I envision the workshop as a shared space where we will dialogue, ask critical questions, and draw stories together.”