Indian-born American physicist and molecular
biologist by name Venki Ramakrishnan
Born 1952, Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India
Indian-born American physicist and molecular biologist who
was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with American
biophysicist and biochemist Thomas Steitz and Israeli protein crystallographer
Ada Yonath, for his research into the atomic structure and function of cellular
particles called ribosomes. (Ribosomes are tiny particles made up of RNA and
proteins that specialize in protein synthesis and are found free or bound to
the endoplasmic reticulum within cells.)
In 1971 Ramakrishnan earned a bachelor’s degree in physics
from Baroda University in Gujarat, India, and in 1976 he received a doctoral
degree in physics from Ohio University in the United States. From 1976 to 1978
he took classes as a graduate student in biology at the University of
California, San Diego, and worked with Mexican American biochemist Mauricio
Montal, studying a molecule called rhodopsin, which forms channels in cell
membranes. Thus, although Ramakrishnan’s initial academic background prepared
him for a career in theoretical physics, his interests later shifted toward
molecular biology. He conducted his postdoctoral research from 1978 to 1982 at
Yale University in New Haven, Conn. At Yale he worked in the laboratory of
American molecular biophysicist and biochemist Peter Moore and learned to use a
technique known as neutron scattering to investigate the structure of the small
subunit of ribosomes in the bacterium Escherichia
coli (ribosomes are composed of two distinct subunits, one large and one
small).
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