Stockholm: Tamil Nadu-born Venkatraman
Ramakrishnan, one of the three winners of this year`s Nobel
Prize in Chemistry, today received the prize at a gala
ceremony here along with other recipients.
The other Nobel laureates in literature, economics,
physics and medicine also received their prizes from Swedish
King Carl XVI Gustaf at a formal event in Stockholm`s Concert
Hall. A record five women were awarded the Nobel this year.
Born in 1952 in Chidambaram and a senior scientist at the
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, Ramakrishnan
shared the Nobel prize with Thomas E Steitz (US) and Ada E
Yonath (Israel) for their "studies of the structure and
function of the ribosome".
"This year`s Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman
Ramakrishnan, Thomas A Steitz and Ada E Yonath for having
showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at
atomic level," the Nobel committee had said in its citation.
All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography
to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of
thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome, it said.
Ramakrishnan earned his B.Sc. in Physics (1971) from
Baroda University and his Ph.D. in Physics (1976) from Ohio
University.
He moved into biology at the University of California,
San Diego, where he took a year of classes, then conducted
research with Dr Mauricio Montal, a membrane biochemist.
