Venkatraman Ramakrishnan Quotes
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We are all human beings, and our nationality is simply an accident of birth.
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I cannot imagine a more enjoyable place to work than in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology where I work.
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I had an excellent math and physics teacher in high school named T.C. Patel, and in the university, I had truly dedicated professors in both physics and mathematics who gave me a sound foundation with which to pursue graduate studies.
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Scientists are not movie stars or politicians who will feel insulted if they are not showered with accolades. Scientists are not interested in accolades.
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Science today is a highly collaborative exercise, and to convert it into a contest, as the Nobel does, is a bad way to look at science.
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I think it's important to give young people the freedom to follow their ideas and pursue their interests.
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Science is an international enterprise where discoveries in one part of the world are useful in other parts.
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I think we are intrinsically prone to being irrational and superstitious. A lot of it comes from our fear of the unknown and the fear of a lack of control over our fate.
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During the decade following the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, the problem of translation - namely, how genetic information is used to synthesize proteins - was a central topic in molecular biology.
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Nobody has approached me about an offer to work in India. However, I can categorically state that if they did so, I would refuse immediately.
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I remember reading a 'Scientific American' article about the use of new physical techniques - including neutron scattering - as a method for unravelling the structure of the ribosome. I was fascinated.
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My earlier exposure to physics certainly helped me in the use of biophysical techniques like crystallography, the use of computing, calculations, etc.
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The Royal Society view is completely apolitical: it will judge anything based on the evidence. One of the big strengths of the Society is that is it widely perceived as impartial and above the fray. We'd like to make sure it stays that way.
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I realise I have inadvertently become a source of inspiration and hope for people in India simply by the fact that I grew up there, went to my local university, but could go on to do well internationally.
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My mother, R. Rajalakshmi, taught at Annamalai University in Chidambaram, and during the day, I was well cared for by aunts and grandparents in the usual way of an extended Indian family.
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I began studying ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Moore's laboratory in 1978.
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It's for scientists to lay out the data and lay out what they think, and then it's for the public to make up its own mind. We don't live in a priesthood where some small group imposes its views on other people - that's not the way that science works, and it's not the way a democratic society should work.
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It's not about where you were born or where you come from that makes you a good scientist. What you need are good teachers, co-students, facilities.
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We benefit tremendously from the E.U. Britain does very well in getting back E.U. money for the amount it puts in.
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Ultimately, biological phenomena involve molecules, and understanding them involves understanding the underlying chemistry. In my opinion, this is a particularly exciting area of chemistry.
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I started working on ribosomes when I was a post doc, in 1978, when it would have been impossible, really, to solve it. But, it was just a fundamental problem in biology.
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People go into science out of curiosity, not to win awards. But scientists are human and have ambitions.
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Like the women in my family, I've found the women in my lab a hard-nosed, ambitious lot who have gone on to be faculty members at top universities. In my own family, it is my father who is prone to bursting into tears.
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The success in the determination of the high-resolution structures of ribosomal subunits and eventually the whole ribosome was the culmination of decades of effort.