CHIDAMBARAM: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Ada Yonath and Thomas Steitz were elevated from the ranks of modest leaders of research teams to Nobel laureates on Wednesday for their work on ribosomes, the body’s protein factories.
Ramakrishnan’s first reaction was to underline that he and his co-laureates were only “captains... of a team.” He said that “really brilliant students and post-docs” did a great deal of the work that led to his Nobel-awarded research and he and his co-laureates were “merely representatives of a large endeavour”.
Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram in 1952. He earned the nickname Venki when he relocated to the US for his PhD, which he obtained at the University of Ohio in 1976. His doctorate was in physics but he converted to chemistry shortly afterwards and became a biology specialist within two years. He started working on ribosomes while at Yale University, and published the work — that won him the Nobel — in 2000.
As the country rejoiced at Ramakrishnan’s feat, there were no signs of celebrations in his birthplace. People in the temple town were both surprised and happy when reporters began enquiring about his house.
However, M S Govindarajan, who taught Ramakrishnan physics when he did his pre-university course at Annamalai University, remembered him. “He was one of the brighter students and always ranked among the top 10.” The 82-year-old retired professor said Ramakrishnan’s win had made him “extremely happy”.
Ramakrishnan had studied up to the third standard in Chidambaram and left the place with his parents for Baroda. He returned for his one-year PUC (1968-69) at the university.
Govindarajan’s daughter G Radhika, a PUC classmate of Ramakrishnan, was unable to remember him.
In fact, many in the town had no clue about the Ramakrishnan family. A few elderly people said the family had lived in Guru Iyer Street.