Venki Ramakrishnan

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (born 1952) is a British-American structural biologist. He shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath for research on the structure and function of ribosomes.^{[6][9][10][11]}

Since 1999, he has worked as a group leader at the

Ramakrishnan was born in 1952 in Chidambaram in Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, India.

His parents, Prof. C. V. Ramakrishnan and Prof.

Ramakrishnan has one sibling, his younger sister Lalita Ramakrishnan, who is professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the department of medicine, University of Cambridge,^[22] and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.^[23]

Ramakrishnan moved to

Immediately after graduation he moved to the US, 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)^[24] supervised by Tomoyasu Tanaka.^[3][25][26] 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.^[27]

Career and research

Ramakrishnan began work on

He continued to work on ribosomes from 1983 to 1995 as a staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.^[4]

In 1995, he moved to the

As of 2019[update] his most cited papers (according to Google Scholar^[32]) have been published in Nature,^[33][34][35] Science,^[36][37] and Cell.^[38][39][40]

Presidency of the Royal Society

Ramakrishnan's term as president of the Royal Society from 2015-2020 was dominated by Brexit and, in his final year, the COVID-19 pandemic and its response.^[41] In an interview in July 2018, he said that Britain's decision to leave the European Union 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.^[42]

Ramakrishnan argued that 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."^[43]

Awards and honours

Ramakrishnan was elected a Member of the

In 2007, Ramakrishnan was awarded the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine^[7] and the Datta Lectureship and Medal of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS).

Ramakrishnan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath.^[46] He received India's second highest civilian honor, the Padma Vibhushan, in 2010.^[47]

In 2008, Ramakrishnan won the Heatley Medal of the British

He has received honorary degrees from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, University of Utah and University of Cambridge. He is also an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,^[49] Somerville College, Oxford,^[50] and The Queen's College, Oxford.^[51]

Ramakrishnan was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to molecular biology,^[5] but does not generally use the title "Sir". That same year, he was awarded the Sir Hans Krebs Medal by the FEBS. In 2014, he was awarded the XLVI Jiménez-Díaz Prize by the Fundación Conchita Rábago (Spain).

In 2017, Ramakrishnan received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.^[52]

Ramakrishnan was included as one of 25 Greatest Global Living Indians by NDTV Channel, India on 14 December 2013.

His certificate of election to the Royal Society reads:

Ramakrishnan is internationally recognised for determination of the atomic structure of the

30S ribosomal subunit. Earlier he mapped the arrangement of proteins in the 30S subunit by neutron diffraction and solved X-ray structures of individual components and their RNA complexes. Fundamental insights came from his crystallographic studies of the complete 30S subunit. The atomic model included over 1500 bases of RNA and 20 associated proteins. The RNA interactions representing the P-site tRNA and the mRNA binding site were identified and the likely modes of action of many clinically important antibiotics determined. His most recent work goes to the heart of the decoding mechanism showing the 30S subunit complexed with poly-U mRNA and the stem-loop of the cognate phenylalanine tRNA. Anti-codon recognition leaves the "wobble" base free to accommodate certain non-Watson/Crick basepairs, thus providing an atomic description of both codon:anti-codon recognition and "wobble". He has also made substantial contributions to understanding how chromatin is organised, particularly the structure of linker histones and their role in higher order folding.^[53]

In 2020, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society^[54] and became a board member of The British Library.^[55]

Ramakrishnan was made a

In 1975, Ramakrishnan married Vera Rosenberry, an author and illustrator of children's books.[1] He has a step-daughter, Tanya Kapka, a physician specializing in public health and health-care delivery to under-served communities; and a son, Raman Ramakrishnan, a cellist specializing in chamber music.^[56]

References