Venkatraman Ramakrishnan Quotes

This is an honour that reflects the quality of science supported by the Medical Research Council, in particular at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. In my case, credit should go to the numerous dedicated postdocs, students, associates and colleagues who made crucial contributions to the work.

No. Geeks make huge advances in society. Newton was the ultimate geek. It should be a compliment.

If I had complained about the prize before I got mine, they may have thought I was anticipating sour grapes. But I complained on the grounds that too many important scientists get missed out for Nobels. Science today is a highly collaborative exercise and to convert it into a contest, as the Nobel does, is a bad way to look at science. On the other hand, I am grateful to the committee for my award. It put the study of ribosome – the cellular machine that turns the blueprint of life into life itself – on front pages round the world.

A life of science struck me as being both interesting and international in character.

I knew the ribosome was going to be the focus of Nobel prizes. It stands at the crossroads of biology, between the gene and what comes out of the gene. But I had convinced myself I was not going to be a winner.

Many in my family were ambivalent about it, but my mother encouraged me to put aside my fears. Vera (my wife) and I finally decided to leave Utah, where we were very happy, take a 40 per cent salary cut and move to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge.

Scientists work by a combination of intuition and insight in trying to understand a question.

It’s an absolutely good thing. I can think of one even better thing for young people, especially in India. It shows them you can study in India, get your basic education in India and you can (then) do whatever you want after that. That’s a very important message.

I remember reading a Scientific American article about the use of new physical techniques – including neutron scattering – as a method for unravelling the structure of the ribosome. I was fascinated. I knew ribosomes were a big fundamental problem in science and this was a method for chipping away at it.

You would have to ask a physicist really but I think understanding fundamental problems in physics is very important because they are part of our culture. You just never know what is going to come from it. If you had told Isaac Newton about spaceships and satellites that arise from his laws of gravity, it would have been science fiction to him.

Scientists are trained to be rational and we are not trained to interact with people and develop social skills. Politics is about being able to convince people. Scientists could do with learning how to do that.

Now many excellent scientists in India are doing really first rate work and it should not matter when the next Indian Nobel Prize is because they are doing very good work — that is what matters and the more you have this infrastructure, with good scientists within India, eventually someone will get a Nobel Prize for work done within India.

It takes a certain amount of courage to tackle very hard problems in science, I now realise. You don't know what the timescale of your work will be: decades or only a few years. Or your approach may be fatally flawed and doomed to fail. Or you could get scooped just as you are finalising your work. It is very stressful.

Find out what really fascinates you and follow that. Almost anything in nature, if you follow it, you will find a scientific problem. That is a better way to do it than following fads, because what is fashionable today may have been solved or fallen out of fashion once you have become a working scientist.

I was quite insistent. We have quite a few pranksters in the lab and I thought this was one of them. I even congratulated the man, ironically, on his Swedish accent.