| Venki" Ramakrishnan (born 1952) is an Indian-born British-American structural biologist who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath, "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome".[3][8][9][10].
Since 1999, he has worked as a group leader at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, UK.[11][12][13][14][15] He served as President of the Royal Society from 2015-2020 [16].
Education and early life
Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram in Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, India[17] to C. V. Ramakrishnan and Rajalakshmi Ramakrishnan in a Tamil Hindu family. Both his parents were scientists, and his father was head of the Department of Biochemistry at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.[1][18][19] At the time of his birth, Ramakrishnan's father was away from India doing postdoctoral research with David E. Green at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US.[1]
His mother obtained a PhD in Psychology from McGill University in 1959.[20] completing it in only 18 months, and was mentored by Donald O. Hebb.[1] Lalita Ramakrishnan, his younger sister, is professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge,[21] and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.[22]
Ramakrishnan moved to Vadodara (previously also known as Baroda) in Gujarat at the age of three, where he had his schooling at Convent of Jesus and Mary, except for spending 1960–61 in Adelaide, Australia. Following his pre-science at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, he did his undergraduate studies in the same university on a National Science Talent Scholarship, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics in 1971.[9] At the time, the physics course at Baroda was new, and based in part on The Berkeley Physics Course and The Feynman Lectures on Physics.[1]
Immediately after graduation he moved to the U.S., where he obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Physics from Ohio University in 1976 for research into the ferroelectric phase transition of potassium dihydrogen phosphate (KDP)[23] supervised by Tomoyasu Tanaka.[7][24][25] Then he spent two years studying biology as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego while making a transition from theoretical physics to biology.[26]
Career and research
Ramakrishnan began work on ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow with Peter Moore at Yale University.[9] After his Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, UK.[11][12][13][14][15] He served as President of the Royal Society from 2015-2020 [16].
Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram in Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, India[17] to C. V. Ramakrishnan and Rajalakshmi Ramakrishnan in a Tamil Hindu family. Both his parents were scientists, and his father was head of the Department of Biochemistry at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.[1][18][19] At the time of his birth, Ramakrishnan's father was away from India doing postdoctoral research with David E. Green at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US.[1]
His mother obtained a PhD in Psychology from McGill University in 1959.[20] completing it in only 18 months, and was mentored by Donald O. Hebb.[1] Lalita Ramakrishnan, his younger sister, is professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge,[21] and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.[22]
Ramakrishnan moved to Vadodara (previously also known as Baroda) in Gujarat at the age of three, where he had his schooling at Convent of Jesus and Mary, except for spending 1960–61 in Adelaide, Australia. Following his pre-science at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, he did his undergraduate studies in the same university on a Psychology from McGill University in 1959.[20] completing it in only 18 months, and was mentored by Donald O. Hebb.[1] Lalita Ramakrishnan, his younger sister, is professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge,[21] and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.[22]
Ramakrishnan moved to Vadodara (previously also known as Baroda) in Gujarat at the age of three, where he had his schooling at Convent of Jesus and Mary, except for spending 1960–61 in Adelaide, Australia. Following his pre-science at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, he did his undergraduate studies in the same university on a National Science Talent Scholarship, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics in 1971.[9] At the time, the physics course at Baroda was new, and based in part on The Berkeley Physics Course and The Feynman Lectures on Physics.[1]
Immediately after graduation he moved to the U.S., where he obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Physics from Ohio University in 1976 for research into the ferroelectric phase transition of potassium dihydrogen phosphate (KDP)[23] supervised by Tomoyasu Tanaka.[7][24][25] Then he spent two years studying biology as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego while making a transition from theoretical physics to biology.[26]
Ramakrishnan began work on ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow with Peter Moore at Yale University.[9] After his post-doctoral fellowship, he initially could not find a faculty position even though he had applied to about 50 universities in the U.S.[27][28]
He continued to work on ribosomes from 1983-95 as a staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.[6] In 1995 he moved to the Brookhaven National Laboratory.[6] In 1995 he moved to the University of Utah as a Professor of Biochemistry, and in 1999, he moved to his current position at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where he had also been a sabbatical visitor during 1991-92 on a Guggenheim Fellowship.
In 1999, Ramakrishnan's laboratory published a 5.5 angstrom resolution structure of the 30S subunit. The following year, his laboratory determined the complete molecular structure of the 30S subunit of the ribosome and its complexes with several antibiotics. This was followed by studies that provided structural insights into the mechanism that ensures the fidelity of protein biosynthesis. In 2007, his laboratory determined the atomic structure of the whole ribosome in complex with its tRNA and mRNA ligands. Since 2013, he has primarily used cryo-EM to determine new ribosome structures.[29][30] Ramakrishnan is also known for his past work on histone and chromatin structure.
As of 2019[update] his most cited papers (according to Google Scholar[31]) have been published in Nature,[32][33][34] Science,[35][36] and Cell.[37][38][39]
In an interview in July 2018, he said that Britain's decision to leave the European Union (Brexit) was hurting Britain's reputation as a good place to work in science, commenting "It's very hard for the science community to see any advantages in Brexit. They are pretty blunt about that." He saw advantages to both the UK and the EU for Britain to continue to be engaged in Galileo and Euratom, which, unlike the European Medicines Agency, are not EU agencies.[40]
Ramakrishnan fears a no deal Brexit would harm science. Ramakrishnan wrote, "A deal on science is in the best interests of Europe as a whole and should not be sacrificed as collateral damage over disagreements on other issues. If we are going to successfully tackle global problems like climate change, human disease and food security, we can't do so in isolation. There is no scenario where trashing our relationships with our closest scientific collaborators in the EU gets us closer to these goals."[41]
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