Indian-origin Scientist Wins Nobel for Chemistry

An Indian origin scientist has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry along with two others, the Nobel Committee announced today.

Tamil Nadu-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a senior scientist at the MRC Laborartory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, won the prestigious award for their “studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”. He shares it with Thomas E Steitz (US) and Ada E Yonath (Israel).

Born in 1952 in Chidambaram, Ramakrishnan earned his BSc in Physics (1971) from Baroda University and his PhD 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.