Venkatraman Ramakrishnan Quotes
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I began studying ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Moore's laboratory in 1978.
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If I were to take an undergraduate chemistry exam, I would probably fail.
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My childhood and adolescence were filled with visiting scientists from both India and abroad, many of whom would stay with us. A life of science struck me as being both interesting and particularly international in its character.
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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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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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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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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.
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Science is curiosity, testing and experimenting.
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I think it is a mistake to judge science by Nobel Prizes.
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There is no room for political, personal or religious ideologies in science.
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Even the best scientists are often insecure and feel the need for recognition.
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Unusually for an Indian man of his generation, my father, being aware of my mother's intellectual abilities, encouraged her to go abroad by herself to obtain a Ph.D.
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There is no magical formula for winning a Nobel Prize.
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Governments and scientists in India need to ensure that politics and religious ideology do not intrude into science. They belong to separate spheres, and if they are not kept separate, it is science in India and the country as a whole that will suffer.
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I'm very grateful to have had many brilliant students and post-docs who have worked with me. Potential is often hard to spot, but a key factor is whether they express a genuine interest in the problem and how they have thought about it.
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I am very grateful for the dedicated work and intellectual contributions of generations of talented postdocs, students and research assistants without whom none of the work from my laboratory would have been possible.
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I am still the same person doing the same science. Why are people so impressed when some academy in Sweden gives an award?
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We live in an increasingly technological world where the issues are quite complex and based on some complicated science.
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It takes a certain amount of courage to tackle very hard problems in science, I now realise. You don't know what the timescale of your work will be: decades or only a few years.
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This is an honour that reflects the quality of science supported by the Medical Research Council, in particular at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. In my case, credit should go to the numerous dedicated postdocs, students, associates and colleagues who made crucial contributions to the work.
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You can only go into science because you're interested in it.
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I was quite insistent. We have quite a few pranksters in the lab and I thought this was one of them. I even congratulated the man, ironically, on his Swedish accent.
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Indeed, many of the founding members of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology were immigrants themselves, and they helped to revolutionise modern biology.'