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
We benefit tremendously from the E.U. Britain does very well in getting back E.U. money for the amount it puts in.
My mother, R. Rajalakshmi, taught at Annamalai University in Chidambaram, and during the day, I was well cared for by aunts and grandparents in the usual way of an extended Indian family.
Scientists are not movie stars or politicians who will feel insulted if they are not showered with accolades. Scientists are not interested in accolades.
We are all human beings, and our nationality is simply an accident of birth.
There is no room for political, personal or religious ideologies in science.
I think it is a mistake to judge science by Nobel Prizes.
People go into science out of curiosity, not to win awards. But scientists are human and have ambitions.
Science is an international enterprise where discoveries in one part of the world are useful in other parts.
There is no magical formula for winning a Nobel Prize.
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.