Venkataraman Ramakrishnan
Venkataraman Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram, a small town Cuddalore
district in Tamil Nadu in 1952 His parents CV. Ramakrishnan and Rajalakshmi
were lecturers in biochemistry at Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda,
Gujarat. Venky, as he is popularly known, did his schooling from the Convent
of Jesus and Mary in Baroda. He migrated to America to do his higher studies
in physics, He then changed his field to biology at the University of
California.
He moved to Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology,
Cambridge, UK. It was there he cracked the complex functions and structures
of ribosomes, which fetched him the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009, along
with Thomas E. Steitz, USA and Ada E. Yonath, Israel. He became the fourth
scientist of Indian origin to win a Nobel Prize after Sir C.V. Raman, Har
Gobind Khorana and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
Venkataraman Ramakrishnan began his career as a Post-Doctoral Fellow with
Peter Moore at Yale University, where he worked on ribosomes. After
completing this research, he applied to nearly 50 universities in the US for
a faculty position. But he was unsuccessful. As a result of this,
Venkataraman continued to work on ribosomes from 1983 to 1995 in Brookhaven
National Laboratory. In 1995, he got an offer from the University of Utah to
work as a professor of biochemistry. He worked there for almost four years
and then moved to England where he started working in Medical Research
Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Here, he began a detailed research
on ribosomes.
In 1999, along with his fellow mates, he published a 55 angstrom resolution
structure of 30s subunit of ribosome. In the subsequent year, Venkataraman
submitted a complete structure of 30s subunit of ribosome and it created a
sensation in the field of structural biology.
In 2007, he was awarded with the Louis-Jearitet Prize for his contribution
to Medicine. In 2008, he was presented with Heatley Medal of British
Biochemistry Society. For his contribution to science, he was conferred with
India's second highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan in 2010.
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