Managed profile Not claimed by Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan has not joined FLAPSS and has not endorsed it. This page is a reference record assembled from published interviews and public remarks. Every answer below is a direct quotation with the source and date shown next to it.

Is this you, or is something wrong?

VR

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Structural biologist; Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 2009

India / United Kingdom · b. 1952

Structural biologist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Trained as a theoretical physicist before moving to biology, and shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. Served as President of the Royal Society from 2015 to 2020.

2 answers 0 followers reference

How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
Well, I'll be honest with you. I was a theoretical physicist but my Ph.D. work was on a problem that was not particularly interesting to me at the time. And I used to subscribe to Scientific American and I found that there were all these wonderful discoveries happening in biology and I also knew that a number of physicists had gone into biology and been successful. So, I decided to switch.

Recorded Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded minutes after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 7 October 2009 source

permalink
What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you have ever made — of money, time, or energy?
No, because I started working on ribosomes when I was a post doc, in 1978, when it would have been impossible, really, to solve it. But, it was just a fundamental problem in biology. And we felt, no matter, anything we do to chip away at the problem would be useful. So it was more that that attracted me. And I think the fact that it was large and kind of difficult to come to grips with, yes, it was attractive. Really what was attractive was that it was a fundamental problem.

Recorded Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded minutes after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 7 October 2009 source

permalink

Every quotation above is reproduced from the source shown beside it and has not been edited. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan did not write these answers for FLAPSS. Request a correction or removal.