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Ramakrishnan receives
Chemistry Nobel
V Ramakrishnan receives the Nobel Prize in
Chemistry from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in
Stockholm on Thursday.
Stockholm: Tamil Nadu-born V Ramakrishnan, one
of the three winners of this year’s Nobel in
Chemistry, on Thursday received the prize at a
gala ceremony here along with other recipients.
The other Nobel laureates in literature,
economics, physics and medicine also received
their prizes from Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf
at a formal event in Stockholm’s Concert Hall. A
record five women were awarded the Nobel this
year. Born in 1952 at Chidambaram, Dr.
Ramakrishnan, a senior scientist at the MRC
Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge,
shared the Nobel with Thomas A Steitz (U.S.) and
Ada E. Yonath (Israel) for their “studies of the
structure and function of the ribosome.”
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They “showed what the ribosome looks like and how it
functions at atomic level,” the Nobel committee said in
its citation. All the three used a method called X-ray
crystallography to map the position for each and every
one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up
the ribosome. Dr. Ramakrishnan earned his B.Sc. in
Physics (1971) from Baroda University and Ph.D. in
Physics (1976) from Ohio University, U.S. He moved into
biology at the University of California, San Diego,
where he took a year of classes, and then conducted
research with Dr. Mauricio Montal, a membrane
biochemist.
