Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty was born on 4 April 1938 in Sainthia, West Bengal (India), the youngest of seven brothers. From an early age, he showed a strong curiosity for science. He studied chemistry at St Xavier’s College in Calcutta and later earned a doctorate in biochemistry under the supervision of Sailesh Chandra Roy. In 1965 he began postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois, where he investigated how bacteria of the genus Pseudomonas degraded hydrocarbons. In 1971 he was recruited by General Electric. Around the same time, he began experimenting with bacteria capable of breaking down hydrocarbons associated with oil spills, an increasingly pressing problem in the late twentieth century. By using plasmid transfer and ultraviolet light-induced mutagenesis, he developed a stable strain of Pseudomonas putida capable of efficiently degrading crude oil.