Spectroscopist Brian Orr writes in AOS News Volume 24 Number 2 2010 (AOS=Australian Optical Society) page 13
I recall one afternoon when the leading NRCC spectroscopist, Gerhard Herzberg, brought an esteemed Indian colleague, R.K. Asundi, down to the basement to see my CO2 laser in operation. Asundi was quiet and contemplative for a while, then he explained how, about forty years beforehand, he had been working with a long, water-jacketed, direct-current-excited discharge tube with multiple-reflection end mirrors and a flowing gas mixture containing CO2 and N2 – very similar to the CO2 laser that he now saw, apart from its infrared-transmissive sodium chloride Brewster-angle end windows. I have often speculated where we would all be now if Asundi had accidentally discovered CO2 laser action a full thirty years before Maiman’s celebrated experiments at Hughes Research Laboratories!Asundi, at that time must have been at Aligarh. Even Maiman did not receive Nobel Prize though he was nominated twice for it. But even then Orr is talking Nobel stuff here.