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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

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VENKATRAMAN RAMAKRISHNAN (Chemistry 2009)

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DR. VENKATRAMAN RAMAKRISHNAN

Nationality
United States/United Kingdom
Institution
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Award
2009
Discipline
Chemistry
Co-recipients
Thomas A. Steitz, Ada E. Yonath
Biography on the Official Web Site of the Nobel Prize

CURRICULUM VITAE
Proteins, as everyone knows, are essential to life. They perform myriad tasks within the body,
from carrying oxygen in our blood, to forming antibodies against infection, even working in our
eyes to sense light. Fewer people, however, have heard of ribosomes these are the
microscopic factories within each cell that build each protein from amino acids, using information
contained in the genes in our DNA that encode the order of amino acids that make up any given
protein. An interesting curiosity is that ribosomes, which make proteins, are themselves made up
of many proteins along with large pieces of RNA, and it is thought that very early in life,
ribosomes contained just the RNA component.

Sir Venki (he was knighted in 2012 but seldom uses the title, being more familiarly known as just
Venki) along with his fellow winners Thomas Steitz, of Yale University, and Ada Yonath, of the
Weizmann Institute, Jerusalem, have between them worked out the structure of the ribosome.

"I knew the ribosome was going to be the focus of Nobel prizes. It stands at the crossroads of
biology, and explains how information in our DNA is transformed into the proteins that make up a
living being, says Venki, who defined the structure of a key part of the ribosome between 2000
and 2002 and then went on to solve the entire ribosome in many states. Although delighted that
the award puts this important bodily component on the front pages of the worlds press, his first
act as a recipient was typically egalitarian he criticised the Nobel selection process that sets a
limit of three recipients per category, saying this overlooks the important work of many
contributors.

Biochemistry is, quite literally, in Venkis blood. His father, CV Ramakrishnan, was also a
biochemist. Indeed, when Venki was born, in 1952 in the ancient Tamil Nadu temple town of
Chidambaram, his father was in America, working with enzymologist David Green. Work often
took both parents away, and in his early years Venki was raised by his aunt and grandmother. At
the age of three, he moved with his parents to the Gujarati town of Baroda (now Vadodara).
Shortly afterwards, his father encouraged his mother, R. Rajalakshmi to go and get a Ph.D. from
McGill University in Canada, and agreed to take care of Venki during her absence. In Baroda,
because of language difficulties, Venki was enrolled in the local English-speaking Catholic school
but also spent a year and a half in Adelaide, Australia which he found both carefree and
educational.

Returning to India he was inspired by a dedicated science and maths teacher, TC Patel. He
enrolled in a one-year pre-science course at the local Maharaja Savajirao University of Baroda,
and at the age of 16 was offered the National Science Talent Scholarship to study for a degree in
physics in Baroda.
After graduating in 1971, Venki was offered a fellowship to study at Ohio University in the US,
where he met his wife, the artist and childrens author Vera Rosenberry. They married in 1975
and Venki found himself, at 23, with a wife, step-daughter and soon a son on the way. He gained
his PhD in 1976 and then, after some searching for a post that almost led to him working with
fellow laureate Thomas Steitz, ended up studying biology for two years at the University of
California, San Diego. In his second year, Venki came across an article in Scientific American by
Don Engelman and Peter Moore about using neutron scattering for locating the proteins in the
ribosome and was fascinated." He wrote to Engelman and in 1978 was drafted into Moores
team at Yale.

After a brief stint at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, in 1983 Venki moved to
Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, under Benno Schoenborn. Neutron scattering was
not useful to obtain detailed atomic structures of biological molecules, so Venki took a
crystallography course at Cold Spring Harbor in 1988, and in 1991 took a years sabbatical to the
Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge to learn
crystallography under the sponsorship of Aaron Klug (1982 Chemistry Nobel Laureate) who was
world famous for his work on chromatin and large molecular assemblies.

Shortly after returning from Cambridge, Venki left Brookhaven to accept an offer to join the
University of Utah as Professor of Biochemistry. His team continued to solve the structure of
proteins but Venki was determined to obtain a detailed structure of the ribosomes 30S subunit.
Due to the way that universities are funded and the high risk and uncertainties of the project, he
approached the LMB which was well known for supporting long term challenging work on
important problems. Thus in 1999, he moved back to Cambridge, despite a 40% pay cut. The
first breakthrough came when they could see a somewhat fuzzy picture of the 30S subunit that
was nevertheless detailed enough for Brian Wimberly to place several proteins and trace the
central domain of the 30S subunit.

There then followed a race against Ada Yonaths team to create a high-resolution structure of the
30S subunit (Steitzs team at Yale was concentrating on a 50S subunit). Luckily, the team was
offered use of the high-intensity Advanced Photon Source in Argonne. The results, says
Ramakrishnan, were stunning, allowing the team to build a model within weeks and perform
studies with antibiotics.

Venki is a member of the Royal Society (he was recently elected to succeed Sir Paul Nurse as its
President) and the US National Academy of Sciences. Among other awards, he received the
2007 Louis-Jeantet prize for medicine as well as Indias second highest civilian award, the
Padma Vibhushan.

LATEST VIDEOS

VENKATRAMAN RAMAKRISHNAN (2015)

Seeing is Believing - A Hundred Years of Visualizing Molecules
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