Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

I'm Jim Alleili and my mission is to interview

the most fascinating and important scientists alive today and to find out what makes them tick.

He may be a Nobel Prize winner and president of the Royal Society,

one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific organizations in the world,

but my guest today says he can identify several points in his career

when he might have fallen off the map.

Venky Ramakrishnan is the embodiment of the international nature of science,

having lived and worked on several continents,

and having traveled through many different fields of science,

from physics to molecular biology.

In 2009 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry

for insights into the structure and function of ribosomes,

those incredible molecular machines that exist within every living cell that turn the information written in our DNA into the proteins that make us what we are and keep us alive.

Venky Ramakrish and welcome to the life scientific. Thank you.

Your scientific achievements Venky have been remarkable and with a Nobel Prize and now the

presidency of the Royal Society, it's easy to assume that it's all been

plain sailing for you. But is it true that despite clearly being very

intellectually able at a young age, you fail to get into any of the prestigious Indian

Institutes of Technology, the IITs. Yes, it's absolutely true. The IIT selection

was done on the basis of a very tough national exam and most parents would pay

...