I don’t know if they want to. The second development was that at about this time, my colleagues Bill Studier and John Dunn had sequenced the genome of the bacteriophage T7, and had begun cloning a number of its genes. What does the primordial ribosome look like? But we had left our families, especially our children, behind and there were just the two of us in England. At times, I goofed off, cut classes. The official handle for the Nobel Prize shared how scientist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan refused to believe he had won the prestigious award for Chemistry, and it is being widely shared on social media. In subsequent years, this course was attended by several well-known scientists including Rod Mackinnon and Art Horwich. I was taken aback by the flood of emails from complete strangers in India, and when they continued unabated for several days, I overreacted to what I felt was an intrusion on my ability to carry out my work. He was also the first in systematic application of interferometry to polarized brightness distributions and an early study of the Zeeman Effect in the 21 cm line emitted by a hydrogen atom. It reinforced in me the feeling that ignorance is not something to be ashamed of, and that no question is too stupid to ask if you want to know the answer. [1] His measurements of polarization of Vela Pulsar were decisive in establishing the picture of a magnetized rotating neutron star and led him to propose the paradigm of curvature radiation from polar caps of neutron stars which has dominated the subject of pulsar emission mechanisms since that time. Starting an Independent Career at Brookhaven The Yale neutron effort on ribosomes was the direct result of instrumentation developed by Benno Schoenborn for the biological use of neutron crystallography and scattering at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Once he and I sat near an open window and decided to jump out of it as soon as attendance was taken to go off and have tea and snacks at a nearby restaurant. In one last hiccup, I almost didn’t move to the LMB when I found I was going to lose John McCutcheon because he had personal reasons not to move, while during the student recruitment day in Cambridge I found myself unable to attract anyone to this effort. I had a very motivating science and math teacher, who made me feel, ‘Oh, this stuff is actually interesting’. He was an internationally acclaimed astrophysicist and also renowned for his design and fabrication of ultralight aircraft and sailboats. I could go to graduate school again, with the option of getting a second Ph.D. or go to medical school, which was ironic since I had turned down the opportunity to do precisely that when I was younger. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan - Nobel Lecture: Unraveling the Structure of the Ribosome. So over the years, we have come to regard England as home. Most people thought that it would be insane to move to England, staking all on this one risky project. For all the latest Eye News, download Indian Express App. I arrived in America a month after my 19th birthday, and spent the summer in Champaign-Urbana with my parents. We have to get countries to enact a common set of regulations so that you don’t have people going off to the science equivalent of tax havens to do what they wish. You have to guard against that and not pontificate about everything. He also co-edited a book of conference-proceedings, "Supernovae : their Progenitors and Remnants" (1985). He was completely exhausted after having spent 48 hours without sleep. That it is not science, because science demands testable evidence. His original contributions in these fields were acknowledged by the Government of India by way of support from the Aeronautics Research Development Board, Ministry of Defence (for designing hang-gliders) and ISRO (for sailboats). It is also true that the human mind can only really concentrate for a couple of hours at a time, and these breaks re-energized people. How could the Indian Science Congress be done differently? The first was that Steve White joined me on the staff at Brookhaven. What led you to write this book (Gene Machine, HarperCollins) about the race to unlock the structure of the ribosome? Even before coming to Utah, I had ideas of solving the structure of the ribosome, beginning with its small or 30S subunit. And I did change. If I had gotten into an IIT of my choice, I would have gone and become an engineer. A strict disciplinarian, he nevertheless had a twinkle in his eye as he would expose us to clever ideas and difficult problems. At the end of the year, I also took national entrance exams for the famous Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and for the Christian Medical College in Vellore, one of the finest medical schools in India, but which had a very small quota for males since it was founded to train female doctors. Shortly after my sister Lalita was born in 1959, my family went to Adelaide, Australia in 1960–61 where I studied in fourth and part of fifth grades. That must have been a fairly radical thing then. When I revealed our findings at the triennial ribosome meeting in Denmark in June, I could sense the shock in the audience, especially since virtually none of them knew we were working on the problem. While many in my family were ambivalent, my mother encouraged me to put aside my fears and go to Cambridge and give it a shot. So after some agonizing, I decided to put aside my fears about funding and move to Utah. Two of them responded: One was Don Engelman, and the other, ironically, was Tom Steitz, with whom I shared the Nobel Prize. As an outsider, you often feel that maybe you are not as good. Reconnecting with India Since I left India at the age of 19, I had been back only three times in about 28 years. Two of them, Daniela Rhodes and Kiyoshi Nagai, had labs adjacent to where I worked and were very welcoming and friendly. Their joining me was a stroke of luck and meant we would have a viable team at the LMB. This feeling of being an outsider has remained with me for much of my life as my career has taken me to various countries. Look for popular awards and laureates in different fields, and discover the history of the Nobel Prize. There were several reasons for this: it was the birthplace of crystallography and many technical developments had occurred there; it had a huge reputation in molecular biology; the director at the time, Aaron Klug, was considered a giant in the field of chromatin structure; finally, Vera and I were both anglophiles and we liked the idea of spending a year in England. But by that time I had already decided I was going to switch to biology. With five of us working long hours, were able to build a complete atomic model for the subunit within weeks. So only a few months after my move to Cambridge, with the rest of my lab still in Utah, we had made a major breakthrough. A life of science struck me as being both interesting and particularly international in its character. Certainly I felt that if I continued in physics, I would be doing boring and tedious calculations rather than making really interesting advances. Personally, the move to Brookhaven was not easy. We have made many good friends who have enriched our lives. Two postdocs, Leong Ng and Israel Sanchez have boldly decided to tackle the eukaryotic ribosome, and Alexey Amunts is involved in a joint collaboration with John Walker on the mitochondrial ribosome. It seemed to me that instead of waiting for the impact of the ribosome work to become clear and then thinking hard about what had really made a difference to the field, the committee had hurriedly decided on which three people they wanted to honor and then written a citation around them that would exclude the others. At the lab, Kiyoshi Nagai, Daniela Rhodes, Phil Evans, and Andrew Leslie are among many people with whom I have become friends over the years. With a capable technician to assist us, Joanna May, we were off and running. With this setup he managed to publish two papers in Nature in quick succession. My colleague and friend John Dunn brought a large stick covered in aluminum foil to my home and presented the symbolic staff to me, saying, “Welcome to the tenured staff.”. from the NIH, were not easy to get, partly because of the overhead costs charged by the lab, which were much higher than charged by many universities. When I heard his voice, it was with a shock that I realized it was true, a feeling that was reinforced when Anders Liljas and Gunnar von Heijne also came on the line to congratulate me. I knew I needed Brian Wimberly on board because of his encyclopedic knowledge of RNA structure and the literature on ribosomes, and as soon as we had made tangible progress, he too joined the team. His parents were both scientists — his father was a biochemist, his mother a psychologist. A lot of fundamental questions remain: How does the ribosome even originate? They did not share my skepticism and could hardly contain themselves. Our studies on decoding continue to this day in the context of the whole ribosome. I suddenly had to make what was one of the hardest decisions of my life: whether to gamble everything on going to the LMB and work exclusively on this project, which would involve taking a large salary cut and leaving our families (including our grown children) in the U.S.A., or to continue working in Utah, where I would probably have to hedge my bets by working on safer projects simultaneously. When Benno learned of my situation in Oak Ridge, he told me to be patient and that a suitable staff scientist position would soon be available at Brookhaven that came with appropriate support and the freedom for independent research. During that interview, I said I was mainly interested in research and not interested in practicing medicine since I felt the U.S. medical system involved a fundamental conflict of interest between doctor and patient.

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