NOBEL LAUREATES OF INDIA - Venkataraman Ramakrishnan

Let’s continue to discover the Nobel Laureates of India during the early 20th century.

Venkataraman Ramakrishnan

     Venkataraman Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram, a small town in Cuddalore district in Tamil Nadu in 1952. His parents C.V. Ramakrishnan and Rajalakshmi were lecturers in biochemistry at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, Gujarat. 

     Venky, as he is popularly known, did his schooling from the Convent of Jesus and Marry in Baroda. He migrated to America to do his higher studies in Physics. He then changed his field to Biology at the University of California.

    

Venkataraman Ramakrishnan

    He moved to MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. It was there he cracked the complex functions and structures of Ribosomes, which fetched him the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009, along with Thomas E. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath. He became the fourth scientist of Indian origin to win a Nobel Prize after sir C.V. Raman, Har Govind Khurana, and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

    Venkataraman Ramakrishnan began his career as a Post Doctoral Fellow with Peter Moore at Yale University, where he worked on ribosomes. After completing this research, he applied to nearly 50 Universities in the US for a faculty position. But he was unsuccessful. As a result of this, Venkataraman continued to work on ribosomes from 1983 to 1995 in Brookhaven National Laboratory.

    In 1995, he got an offer from the University of Utah to work as a Professor of Biochemistry. He worked there for almost four years and then moved to England where he started working in the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Here, he began detailed research on ribosomes.

    In 1999, along with his fellow mates, he published a 5.5-angstrom resolution structure of a 30s subunit of the ribosome. In the subsequent year, Venkataraman submitted a complete structure of the 30s subunit of the ribosome and it created a sensation in the field of structural biology.

    Venkataraman earned a fellowship from the Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Royal Society. He is also an honorary member of the US National Academy of Sciences. In 2007, he was awarded the Louis-Jeantet Prize for his contribution to medicine. In 2008, he was presented with the Heatley Medal of the British Biochemistry Society. 

    For his contribution to Science, he was conferred with India's second-highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan in 2010.

(Excerpt from SCIENCE INDIA-The National Science Magazine, ISSN 0972-8287)

-> Read on Sir C V Raman - the discoverer of "The Raman Effect"
-> Read on Nobel Prize Winner in Physics- Sri. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
-> Read on Nobel Laureate - Sir Ronald Ross
-> Read on Indian Nobel Laureate- Dr. HarGovind Khurana

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