Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
Venkatraman “Venki” Ramakrishnan is an Indian American and British structural biologist of Indian origin. He is the current President of the Royal Society, having held the position since November 2015. In 2009 he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath, "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". Since 1999, he has worked as a group leader at the Medical Research CouncilLaboratory of Molecular Biologyon the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, UK, where he...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
CountryUnited States of America
I think we are intrinsically prone to being irrational and superstitious. A lot of it comes from our fear of the unknown and the fear of a lack of control over our fate.
We benefit tremendously from the E.U. Britain does very well in getting back E.U. money for the amount it puts in.
I knew the ribosome was going to be the focus of Nobel prizes. It stands at the crossroads of biology, between the gene and what comes out of the gene. But I had convinced myself I was not going to be a winner.
I am very grateful for the dedicated work and intellectual contributions of generations of talented postdocs, students and research assistants without whom none of the work from my laboratory would have been possible.
Governments and scientists in India need to ensure that politics and religious ideology do not intrude into science. They belong to separate spheres, and if they are not kept separate, it is science in India and the country as a whole that will suffer.
During the decade following the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, the problem of translation - namely, how genetic information is used to synthesize proteins - was a central topic in molecular biology.
You can only go into science because you're interested in it.
We live in an increasingly technological world where the issues are quite complex and based on some complicated science.
There is no magical formula for winning a Nobel Prize.
Science today is a highly collaborative exercise, and to convert it into a contest, as the Nobel does, is a bad way to look at science.
Science is an international enterprise where discoveries in one part of the world are useful in other parts.
People go into science out of curiosity, not to win awards. But scientists are human and have ambitions.
Nobody has approached me about an offer to work in India. However, I can categorically state that if they did so, I would refuse immediately.
I was born in 1952 in Chidambaram, an ancient temple town in Tamil Nadu best known for its temple of Nataraja, the lord of dance.