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 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.
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 cannot imagine a more enjoyable place to work than in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology where I work.
If you go to a second-rate place, and you are first-rate, it is very difficult to do first-rate work because you do not get that critical feedback you need for first-rate work on a daily basis.
It's for scientists to lay out the data and lay out what they think, and then it's for the public to make up its own mind. We don't live in a priesthood where some small group imposes its views on other people - that's not the way that science works, and it's not the way a democratic society should work.
It takes a certain amount of courage to tackle very hard problems in science, I now realise. You don't know what the timescale of your work will be: decades or only a few years.
I'm very grateful to have had many brilliant students and post-docs who have worked with me. Potential is often hard to spot, but a key factor is whether they express a genuine interest in the problem and how they have thought about it.
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.
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.