Venki Ramakrishnan

Ramakrishnan was born in 1952 in Chidambaram in Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, India. His parents, Prof. C. V. Ramakrishnan and Prof. Rajalakshmi Ramakrishnan were both scientists, and his father was head of the department of biochemistry at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. At the time of his birth, Ramakrishnan's father was away from India doing postdoctoral research with David E. Green at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the US. completing it in only 18 months, and was mentored, among others, by Donald O. Hebb. and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Ramakrishnan moved to Vadodara (previously also known as Baroda) in Gujarat at the age of three, where he had his entire schooling at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, except for a year and a half (1960–61) which he and his family spent in Adelaide, Australia. Following his pre-science at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, he did his undergraduate studies in the same university on a National Science Talent Scholarship, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics in 1971. At the time, the physics course at Baroda was new, and based in part on the Berkeley Physics Course and The Feynman Lectures on Physics. supervised by Tomoyasu Tanaka. Then he spent two years studying biology as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego while making a transition from theoretical physics to biology. ==Career and research==

Ramakrishnan began work on ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow with Peter Moore at Yale University. He continued to work on ribosomes from 1983 to 1995 as a staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Ramakrishnan is also known for his work on histone and chromatin structure. his most cited papers according to Google Scholar have been published in Nature, Science, and Cell. Presidency of the Royal Society Ramakrishnan's term as president of the Royal Society from 2015–2020 was dominated by Brexit and, in his final year, the COVID-19 pandemic and its response. In an interview in July 2018, he said that Britain's decision to leave the European Union was hurting Britain's reputation as a good place to work in science, commenting "It's very hard for the science community to see any advantages in Brexit. They are pretty blunt about that." He saw advantages to both the UK and the EU for Britain to continue to be engaged in Galileo and Euratom, which, unlike the European Medicines Agency, are not EU agencies. Ramakrishnan argued that a no-deal Brexit would harm science. Ramakrishnan wrote, "A deal on science is in the best interests of Europe as a whole and should not be sacrificed as collateral damage over disagreements on other issues. If we are going to successfully tackle global problems like climate change, human disease and food security, we can't do so in isolation. There is no scenario where trashing our relationships with our closest scientific collaborators in the EU gets us closer to these goals." Awards and honours Ramakrishnan was elected a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2002, a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2003, and a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2004. In 2007, Ramakrishnan was awarded the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine He received India's second highest civilian honor, the Padma Vibhushan, in 2010. In 2008, Ramakrishnan won the Heatley Medal of the British Biochemical Society, and became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and a foreign Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy. He has been a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and an Honorary Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (Hon FMedSci) since 2010. He has received honorary degrees from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, University of Utah, Ohio University and University of Cambridge. He is also an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Somerville College, Oxford, and The Queen's College, Oxford. Ramakrishnan was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to molecular biology, but does not generally use the title "Sir". That same year, he was awarded the Sir Hans Krebs Medal by the FEBS. In 2014, he was awarded the XLVI Jiménez-Díaz Prize by the Fundación Conchita Rábago (Spain). In 2017, Ramakrishnan received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. Ramakrishnan was included as one of 25 Greatest Global Living Indians by NDTV Channel, India on 14 December 2013. His certificate of election to the Royal Society reads: In 2020, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society and became a board member of the British Library. Ramakrishnan was made a Member of the Order of Merit (OM) in 2022. ==Personal life==

In 1975, Ramakrishnan married Vera Rosenberry, an author and illustrator of children's books. ==Books==

• Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and The Quest for Immortality (2024) • Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome (2018) ==References==