After Sweden, I went on my usual annual visit to India, but this time with some trepidation because I did not know what the reaction to me would be given the email controversy. There were a lot of people interested in ribosomes and RNA there, including Ray Gesteland, John Atkins, Brenda Bass, and Jim McCloskey. She has been my companion and friend ever since, and has not only done most of the work of raising our children but uprooted herself many times to move with me all over the U.S.A. and to England. I rather naively told him that all I needed was a small corner in his lab. This sudden change in my responsibilities made me realize that I had to get on with my career. She encouraged me to take the scholarship exam, and arranged for me to do the required research project with a colleague of hers in the Biochemistry Department on quantifying nitrogen fixation by leguminous plants, which was somewhat ironic given my general apathy towards biology courses.At the end of the year, I also took national entrance exams for the famous Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and for the Christian Medical College in Vellore, one of the finest medical schools in India, but which had a very small quota for males since it was founded to train female doctors. She does this in her usual matter-of-fact way without complaining, and given my other duties in the last few years, the lab would run into great difficulties without her.That isolation has been compensated for by life in Cambridge. As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale, he began his research on the structure and function of the ribosome, a major structure in all cells that interprets genetic instructions to produce proteins. The conversation was unlike any other job interview. Perhaps because of this and the fact that my mother and sister both went into science, I have felt perfectly comfortable among women even when I am the only male present, and there have been times when my lab has consisted almost entirely of women.A critical decision that students have to make after their pre-science year is whether to go into medicine or engineering. I felt the best way to learn how to solve these structures was to go away on sabbatical and do nothing else but work on them. When he started the department, there was just some empty lab space with no equipment or people. Another postdoc, Matt Firpo, worked on the problem for about a year, but had to leave when his funding ran out.The project really took off when the two graduate students came on board. Fortunately, two people courageously agreed to join my lab at the LMB without ever having met me: Andrew Carter, who joined me from Oxford as a Ph.D. student, and Ditlev Brodersen, a postdoc who came highly recommended to me from Århus in Denmark, where I knew his supervisor Morten Kjeldgaard. Once he and I sat near an open window and decided to jump out of it as soon as attendance was taken to go off and have tea and snacks at a nearby restaurant. Both recognized from their own careers the ambition to solve a fundamental problem regardless of the challenges. Certainly, it seems to have fired up people in my laboratory, and I look forward to the struggles ahead as we try to answer some of the hard questions in our field and beyond. I began to realize that the Nobel Prize could be seen not just as an affirmation of my past work but also as an encouragement to continue to work on interesting problems.
The normal route for science students was to do a master’s at some university in India before thinking of going abroad. After the celebration, Vera and I walked my bicycle home in the rain. By this time, Brian and Bil had moved from Utah, and we needed to focus on getting to high resolution.Given the competition, we wanted to ensure that our data collection at the APS was a success, since it was not clear that we could avoid being scooped if that trip failed. Venki Ramakrishnan was born in India to a family of scientists. This part of the ribosome is also the target of antibiotics such as thiostrepton. I was honored that the Government of India decided to bestow upon me their second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan. Our simple car-free life style, coupled with the rich cultural life of Cambridge and the proximity of London has made our daily lives in Cambridge a pleasure. Biography Abstract. Shortly after my sister Lalita was born in 1959, my family went to Adelaide, Australia in 1960–61 where I studied in fourth and part of fifth grades. The result was that by the end of my sabbatical year, both structures were solved and eventually published in I wrote to Richard Henderson, the head of the Structural Studies Division at the LMB to ask if they had any openings for me. He wrote back an encouraging letter, and supported my application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, which covered half my salary while Brookhaven paid the other half.At Brookhaven, Bob Sweet taught me a great deal about data collection and crystallography in general. However, international prizes for work on ribosomes always seemed to go to other people. at the time of the award and later published in the book series Tasked with a mission to manage Alfred Nobel's fortune and has ultimate responsibility for fulfilling the intentions of Nobel's will.For more than a century, these academic institutions have worked independently to select Nobel Laureates in each prize category.Several outreach organisations and activities have been developed to inspire generations and disseminate knowledge about the Nobel Prize.