Raghunath Mashelkar, also known as Ramesh Mashelkar was born in a village Mashel in Goa and brought up in Maharashtra. Dr Mashelkar was the Director of NCL for 6 years. He transformed Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), a network of 38 laboratories, wherein he served as its Director General, for over 11 years. Led by Mashelkar, CSIR successfully fought the battle of revocation of the US patent on wound healing properties of turmeric, claiming that this was India's traditional knowledge and therefore not novel. This led to the creation of India's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, which helped in prevention of the grant of wrong patents on traditional knowledge. He has received honorary doctorates from 42 global universities. He was the President of Indian National Science Academy. In 1998, he was elected as Fellow of Royal Society of London. The President of India honoured Dr Mashelkar with Padma Vibhushan (2014), Padma Bhushan (2000) and Padma Shri (1991). He has been propagating a culture of innovation and balanced intellectual property rights regime in India for over a decade.

Satyendra Bose was an Indian physicist. He specialised in theoretical physics. He was known for his work on Quantum Mechanics in the early 1920s, which provided the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 by the Government of India. In 1986, the S.N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences was established. He also did some research in biotechnology, zoology, anthropology, and other sciences. Bose set up X-ray crystallography laboratory in which there were laboratories for X-ray spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, magnetic properties of matter, optical spectroscopy etc. Bosons, a class of elementary subatomic particles in particle physics were named after Satyendra Nath Bose to commemorate his contributions to science.