An Obituary: Professor Asheem Kumar Basu

Prof. A K Basu [Figure 1] is no more. He breathed his last on January 27, 2026, at his home in Kolkata 6 months before his 100^th birthday. He was one of the last hematologists of the school of tropical medicine (STM) Kolkata being a part of the legendary JB Chatterjea‘s group. The group that put the hematology research and service in the front font of India in 1960–1980.

Close

Figure 1:

Prof. Asheem Kumar Basu

Export to PPT

He was born on May 22, 1927, in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and graduated from The Medical College, Bengal (Now Kolkata Medical College) in 1951. As was usual in those days a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene (DTM and H) was considered good for practice in both in laboratory and clinical practice. So after completing MBBS he finished DTM and H from Kolkata and went to England for higher studies. He joined the London STM and hygiene under University of London for a PhD programme under Prof. A W Woodroff.

After finishing his PhD in 1963 probably in the area of sickle cell hemoglobinopathy he came back to India and joined the Department of Haematology at The STM, Calcutta, in 1964, as a faculty under the leadership of legendary Prof. J B Chatterjea. He remained with the institute till his retirement in 1984. Subsequently, he practiced privately in his own house in South Kolkata.

The department of hematology under Prof. J B Chatterjea was a perfect place to practice both clinical and laboratory hematology as he created a department with clinicians, pathologists, biochemists, microbiologists, and epidemiologists. Prof. Basu felt quite at home in that place and soon settled with the coagulation laboratory as his favored area of research and day to day clinical activities of the department.

The department in 1960s and 70s were extremely busy and he was working on nutritional hematology, hemoglobinopathies, blood coagulation, hematology of infectious diseases and malignant hematology to name a few.

A list of Prof. Basu’s publications appended below shows with ample clarity the length and breadth of his work. A large number of these publications were outside blood coagulation as a result of some of his later training abroad and its application back home.

He authored more than 50 research papers (some of which is appended below) and was instrumental in bringing out a Monograph commemorating Prof. JB Chatterjea in 1974 as one of its editors.

In the field of blood coagulation, he investigated coagulation changes in Kala Azar and demonstrated factor XIII deficiency with that disease. Even in those early days, he showed some patients with hemophilia produce inhibitor. That is amazing, as was also his reported case of Von Willebrand disease. He did demonstrate coagulation inhibitor with autoimmune hemolytic anemia which in all probability was a Lupus Inhibitor, though it was not named it that way. Several papers he wrote on bleeding tendency in kwashiorkor and ITP as well as fibrinolytic analysis in several diseases.

His study showed abnormal thromboplastin generation in hemoglobinopathy. This is very interesting and I don’t remember any of us has taken up further clarification on this work. This is essential. In association with some of the transfusion transmitted infection can produce inhibitors, not to speak of the liver dysfunction as a part of the iron overload which is very often associated with transfusion dependent hemoglobinopathy.

The finding that in leukemia post chemotherapy recovery of erythropoiesis could be predicted early by a sudden drop of serum iron level is an amazing observation and could be used at that point in time in the history of hematology when we had restricted investigative ability.

Some of the interesting case reports such as JCML, Gaucher’s disease, and autoerythrocyte sensitization were also recorded.

In the publications of Prof. AK Basu, which have been appended below, many such important nuggets of wisdom can be gleaned.

He produced some of the coagulation reagents for laboratory consumption as that was not available easily commercially as we purchase it today.

Again, I will request the readers to look carefully at his publication list. Below are some of the very interesting things that will amaze us:

I. Words such as Sicklemic States, Hemoglobulin S, Marrowgraphic study are terms which are no longer used literature.

II. Majority of the papers were published in Bulletin of The STM, which was indexed journal then and is no longer published now. The authors could have published their work in foreign journals, but they did not.

He worked from June 1970 to June 1971 at Montefiore Hospital and Medical CentER at New York under Dr. T. H. Spaet and worked at Kanematsu Memorial Institute, Sydney Hospital under Dr. F W Gunz, from July 1974 to August 1975. He also became a fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists, London.

He had many national recognitions in hematology during his career. He was president of the Indian Society of Haematology and Blood Transfusion (1984). He was a member of many scientific advisory bodies and a member of several task forces in the subject at ICMR. He was invited as an expert in many selection committees, for example, of PGIMER. He received the lifetime award of our society for his contribution in the area.

He was examiner of the first DNB hematology examination, which one of the writers undertook at All India Institute Of Medical Sciences Delhi, New Delhi in 1983.

Prof. Basu was a very soft-spoken person. Even at his age, he was always eager to learn new things and mentored our generation of hematologists to take up this subject as our career when there were scant takers of hematology or transfusion medicine specialty in our country.

His demise does leave a void in the subject, and his pleasant presence will always be missed by many. He is survived by his daughter. May his soul rest in peace.