Words matter. These are the best Venkatraman Ramakrishnan Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Science is curiosity, testing and experimenting.
There is no room for political, personal or religious ideologies in science.
We live in an increasingly technological world where the issues are quite complex and based on some complicated science.
People go into science out of curiosity, not to win awards. But scientists are human and have ambitions.
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.
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.
I knew the ribosome was going to be the focus of Nobel prizes. It stands at the crossroads of biology, between the gene and what comes out of the gene. But I had convinced myself I was not going to be a winner.
I think it is a mistake to judge science by Nobel Prizes.
Scientists are not movie stars or politicians who will feel insulted if they are not showered with accolades. Scientists are not interested in accolades.
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.
I think it’s important to give young people the freedom to follow their ideas and pursue their interests.
I cannot imagine a more enjoyable place to work than in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology where I work.
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.
I began studying ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Moore’s laboratory in 1978.
Ultimately, biological phenomena involve molecules, and understanding them involves understanding the underlying chemistry. In my opinion, this is a particularly exciting area of chemistry.
If you go to a second-rate place, and you are first-rate, it is very difficult to do first-rate work because you do not get that critical feedback you need for first-rate work on a daily basis.
My earlier exposure to physics certainly helped me in the use of biophysical techniques like crystallography, the use of computing, calculations, etc.
Even the best scientists are often insecure and feel the need for recognition.
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.
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.
Science is an international enterprise where discoveries in one part of the world are useful in other parts.
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.
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.
There is no magical formula for winning a Nobel Prize.
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.
