WASHINGTON: Tamil Nadu-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan made a billion Indians proud on Wednesday when he won the Nobel prize for chemistry, along with fellow American scientist Thomas Steitz and Israel’s Ada Yonath, for mapping ribosomes, the protein-producing factories within cells at the atomic level.
Ramakrishnan, who moved to the US in the 1970s to pursue higher education, heads the Structural Studies Division at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, where he relocated in 1999.
He joins a select group of Indians and people of Indian origin who have won the Nobel in various disciplines. The list includes Rabindranath Tagore, C V Raman, Hargobind Khorana, S Chandrashekhar, Mother Teresa, Amartya Sen and R K Pachauri who as the chair of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice-President Al Gore two years ago.
“I have to say that I am deeply indebted to all of the brilliant associates, students and post docs who worked in my lab as science is a highly collaborative enterprise.
The MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the University of Utah supported this work and the collegiate atmosphere there made it all possible,” Ramakrishnan said in a statement from Cambridge. Born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, in 1952, Ramakrishan gained a PhD in physics from Ohio University in 1976. He moved into biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he took a year of classes, then conducted research with Dr Mauricio Montal, a membrane biochemist. Since 1999, he has been the group leader at MRC Laboratory’s Structural Studies Division and a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.
After starting out as a a theoretical physicist, he made his transition to biology with a graduate course from University of California, San Diego.
Ramakrishnan, author of several important papers in scientific journals, has been studying ribosomes ever since he began working on a neutron- scattering map of the small ribosomal subunit of E Coli while at Yale.