Venki Ramakrishnan

Venki Ramakrishnan (born 1952, Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India) Indian-born physicist and molecular biologist who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with American biophysicist and biochemist Thomas Steitz and Israeli protein crystallographer Ada Yonath, for his research into the atomic structure and function of cellular particles called ribosomes. (Ribosomes are tiny particles made up of RNA and proteins that specialize in protein synthesis and are found free or bound to the endoplasmic reticulum within cells.) Ramakrishnan held dual citizenship in the United States and Great Britain.

In 1971 Ramakrishnan earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Baroda University in Gujarat, India, and in 1976 he received a doctoral degree in physics from Ohio University in the United States. From 1976 to 1978 he took classes as a graduate student in biology at the University of California, San Diego, and worked with Mexican American biochemist Mauricio Montal, studying a molecule called rhodopsin, which forms channels in cell membranes. Thus, although Ramakrishnan’s initial academic background prepared him for a career in theoretical physics, his interests later shifted toward molecular biology. He conducted his postdoctoral research from 1978 to 1982 at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. At Yale he worked in the laboratory of American molecular biophysicist and biochemist Peter Moore and learned to use a technique known as neutron scattering to investigate the structure of the small subunit of ribosomes in the bacterium Escherichia coli (ribosomes are composed of two distinct subunits, one large and one small).

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From 1983 to 1995 Ramakrishnan was a biophysicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. There he continued to utilize neutron scattering, as well as another technique called X-ray crystallography, to elucidate the structure of ribosomes and other molecules, including chromatin and proteins known as histones. In 1999 Ramakrishnan took a position in the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the University of Cambridge in England. The following year he published a series of groundbreaking scientific papers in which he presented data on the RNA structure and organization of the small ribosomal subunit of Thermus thermophilus (a bacterium that is commonly used in genetics research) and revealed the structures of antibiotics bound to small subunits of ribosomes at a resolution of just 3 angstroms (Å; 1 Å is equivalent to 10⁻¹⁰ metre, or 0.1 nanometre). Ramakrishnan later wrote Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome (2018).

Ramakrishnan was elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2004 and a foreign member of the Indian National Science Academy in 2008. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2003 and later became the society’s first Indian-born president (2015–20). Ramakrishnan received the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2007 and the Heatley Medal, awarded by the British Biochemical Society, in 2008. He was included in the United Kingdom’s New Year Honours List for 2012 as a knight bachelor.