Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, born in 1952, is a British-American structural biologist. He won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath for their research on the structure and function of ribosomes.

Since 1999, he has worked as a group leader at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in the United Kingdom. He is also a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was President of the Royal Society from 2015 to 2020.

Education and early life

Ramakrishnan was born in 1952 in Chidambaram, which is a district in Tamil Nadu, India. His parents, Prof. C. V. Ramakrishnan and Prof. Rajalakshmi Ramakrishnan, were both scientists. At the time of Ramakrishnan’s birth, his father was in the United States doing research with David E. Green at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His mother earned a PhD in psychology from McGill University in 1959, completing it in just 18 months. She was guided by Donald O. Hebb, among others.

Ramakrishnan has one sibling, his younger sister Lalita Ramakrishnan, who is a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the University of Cambridge and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ramakrishnan moved to Vadodara (formerly known as Baroda) in Gujarat, India, at the age of three. He attended school at the Convent of Jesus and Mary there, except for a year and a half (1960–61), when he and his family lived in Adelaide, Australia. After completing his early education at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, he studied physics at the same university with a National Science Talent Scholarship. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1971. At that time, the physics program at Baroda was newly created and included ideas from the Berkeley Physics Course and The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

After graduating, Ramakrishnan moved to the United States, where he earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in physics from Ohio University in 1976. His research focused on the ferroelectric phase transition of potassium dihydrogen phosphate (KDP), supervised by Tomoyasu Tanaka. Later, he spent two years studying biology at the University of California, San Diego, while shifting his focus from theoretical physics to biology.

Career and research

Ramakrishnan began working on ribosomes as a postdoctoral researcher with Peter Moore at Yale University. After completing his postdoctoral work, he struggled to find a teaching job, even though he had applied to about 50 universities in the United States.

He continued researching ribosomes from 1983 to 1995 as a staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In 1995, he joined the University of Utah as a professor of biochemistry. In 1999, he moved to the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where he had previously visited as a guest researcher on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In 1999, Ramakrishnan’s laboratory published a 5.5 angstrom resolution structure of the 30S subunit of the ribosome. The next year, his team determined the complete molecular structure of the 30S subunit and its interactions with several antibiotics. Later studies explained how the ribosome ensures accuracy in protein production. In 2007, his laboratory mapped the atomic structure of the entire ribosome with its tRNA and mRNA molecules. Since 2013, he has used Cryogenic electron microscopy to study eukaryotic and mitochondrial translation. He is also known for his research on histone and chromatin structure.

As of 2019, his most cited papers were published in Nature, Science, and Cell.

Ramakrishnan served as president of the Royal Society from 2015 to 2020. During this time, he focused on challenges from Brexit and the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2018, he said that Brexit was harming Britain’s reputation as a strong place for scientific work. He believed the UK and EU should continue cooperation on projects like Galileo and Euratom, which are not EU-run. He warned that a no-deal Brexit would harm scientific progress, stating that global challenges like climate change and disease require international collaboration.

Ramakrishnan was elected a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2002, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003, and a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2004.

In 2007, he received the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine and the Datta Lectureship and Medal from the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS).

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, along with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath. In 2010, he received India’s Padma Vibhushan, its second-highest civilian honor.

In 2008, he won the Heatley Medal from the British Biochemical Society and became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a foreign Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy. He has been a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and an Honorary Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences since 2010.

He has received honorary degrees from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, the University of Utah, Ohio University, and the University of Cambridge. He is also an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Somerville College, Oxford, and The Queen’s College, Oxford.

Ramakrishnan was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours for his work in molecular biology, though he does not usually use the title “Sir.” That same year, he received the Sir Hans Krebs Medal from FEBS. In 2014, he was awarded the XLVI Jiménez-Díaz Prize by the Fundación Conchita Rábago (Spain).

In 2017, he received the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement.

He was named one of 25 Greatest Global Living Indians by NDTV Channel, India, on December 14, 2013.

His certificate of election to the Royal Society states:

In 2020, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society and joined the board of the British Library.

Ramakrishnan was made a Member of the Order of Merit (OM) in 2022.

Personal life

In 1975, Ramakrishnan married Vera Rosenberry, who writes and creates pictures for children's books. They have a stepdaughter named Tanya Kapka, who is a doctor and works in public health to help provide healthcare to people who need it most. They also have a son named Raman Ramakrishnan, who plays the cello and performs in small musical groups. He is also a teacher at Bard College in New York State.

Books

• Why People Die: New Discoveries About Aging and the Search for Living Forever (2024)
• The Gene Machine: The Race to Solve the Mysteries of the Ribosome (2018)