SirSir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan — "Venki" to virtually everyone who knows him — solved one of the grandest structural problems in all of biology, and he arrived at it as an outsider not once but twice, first crossing an ocean and then abandoning the entire scientific field in which he had trained. His career is a standing argument for the honestly chosen mid-course correction, and for the value the diaspora places on the willingness to start again.

A Tamil scientific household

He was born in 1952 in Chidambaram, a temple town in Tamil Nadu, into a family of scientists — both his parents were biochemists, and his father headed a university department. He grew up largely in Baroda, in Gujarat, where his father worked, and took his first degree there, in physics, at Maharaja Sayajirao University. Like so many of his generation of ambitious Indian graduates, he then left for the United States, where he earned a doctorate in physics at Ohio University in 1976.

The great gamble

And then he did something that takes real nerve: he concluded that his physics was going nowhere, that he was not going to make an important contribution in the field, and that he should start over. In his late twenties, already holding a physics PhD, Ramakrishnan enrolled as a graduate student in biology at the University of California, San Diego, effectively beginning his scientific education a second time. He has written about this candidly in his memoir, including the anxiety and the loss of status involved, and it is one of the reasons his story resonates so widely: the recognition that a prestigious credential is worth less than working on the right problem.

The ribosome

The right problem, it turned out, was the ribosome — the vast, ancient molecular machine present inside every living cell, which reads the genetic instructions carried by messenger RNA and translates them into proteins, the workhorses of life. Determining the ribosome's precise atomic structure was one of the hardest and most coveted problems in structural biology, pursued for decades by rival laboratories using X-ray crystallography on a molecule of staggering complexity. Working first in the United States and then, from 1999, at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge — the legendary institution of Crick, Perutz and Sanger — Ramakrishnan and his team determined the atomic structure of the ribosome's small subunit. The achievement did more than satisfy scientific curiosity: it revealed, atom by atom, how the ribosome achieves the fidelity of translation, and precisely how many antibiotics work, by binding to and jamming the ribosomes of bacteria. That understanding is directly useful in designing new antibiotics against resistant infections.

The Nobel and the establishment

For this work Ramakrishnan shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath. Honours accumulated in both his countries of belonging: a knighthood in Britain in 2012, and India's Padma Vibhushan. Then, in 2015, he was elected President of the Royal Society — the scientific academy founded in the seventeenth century, once led by Isaac Newton — the first person of Indian origin to hold Newton's old chair. He used the platform bluntly, speaking during the Brexit years about the centrality of immigration to British science and warning against policies that would cut the country off from global talent, an argument he was uniquely placed to make.

The writer

Ramakrishnan has become, unusually for a laureate, a fine and honest writer. His memoir Gene Machine is disarmingly frank about the ambition, rivalry, luck and pettiness of elite science — a rare inside account that punctures the myth of the lone genius and describes the real, competitive, human scramble behind a Nobel. His later book, Why We Die, turned his structural biologist's eye onto the science of ageing and mortality for a general readership.

Why the Roll remembers him

Ramakrishnan belongs on this Roll not only for the ribosome and the Nobel and Newton's chair, but for the shape of the journey — the physicist from Baroda who admitted his first field was a dead end and had the courage to become a biology graduate student in his late twenties, and who then went on to solve a problem others had chased for decades. It is a distinctly diasporic story: the willingness to uproot, to start over, to trade the security of a credential for the chance at the right work. Few careers make a better case that where you begin matters less than your honesty about where you are, and your nerve in changing course. The boy from the temple town who twice began again ended by mapping the machine that builds all life, and by occupying the chair of Newton.

The race, told honestly

What makes Ramakrishnan unusual among laureates is his refusal to romanticise the science that won him the prize. His memoir Gene Machine is a startlingly candid account of the decades-long race to crack the ribosome's structure — the rivalries with the other laboratories chasing the same goal, the near-misses, the role of luck and timing, the anxiety and the ego that drive elite science. It punctures the myth of the serene lone genius and describes the real, competitive, all-too-human scramble behind a great discovery, and it has been read as much by aspiring scientists for its honesty as for its science.

The statesman of science

As President of the Royal Society from 2015, Ramakrishnan used one of the most prestigious platforms in world science to speak plainly on matters others avoided. During the Brexit debates he warned bluntly that British science depended on immigration and international collaboration, and would suffer if the country turned inward — an argument he was singularly qualified to make, as a physicist-turned-biologist from Tamil Nadu who had done his prizewinning work in a British laboratory. He has written and spoken about scientific integrity, the pressures that distort research, and, in his later book Why We Die, the biology of ageing and mortality for a general readership. Knighted in Britain and honoured with the Padma Vibhushan in India, he remains the diaspora's example of the honestly chosen second chance: the man who admitted his first field was a dead end, started over in his late twenties, and ended by solving one of biology's grandest problems and occupying the chair of Newton.