Venki Ramakrishnan

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2018

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

Venki Ramakrishnan is a Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist. He is most renowned for his research into the atomic structure of the ribosome - a complex molecule in the cell which translates DNA into chains of amino acids that build proteins, the essence of life. This work eventually secured Venki a Nobel Prize in 2009, which he shared with Ada Yonath and Thomas Steitz. Venki was born in Tamil Nadu, in the south of India. Both his parents were scientists, and both pursued postgraduate studies overseas when Venki was very young. He completed his schooling in India, and then moved to the United States. Life on an American campus in the early 1970s was, he recalls, a culture shock for a self-confessed nerdy young Indian. He completed a PhD in Physics in 1976, but then switched to biology which he felt was a more exciting discipline. His research into the ribosome began when he was working at Yale as a post-doctoral fellow in the late 1970s. He moved to the UK in 1999, joining the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge as a group leader. He was knighted in 2012, and has served as President of the Royal Society since 2015, where he has argued that science should enjoy a central place in the curriculum and in our wider culture. Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Sarah Taylor

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts
0:04.8	Hello, I'm Lauren LeVern and this is the Desert Island Disks Podcast.
0:08.4	Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take
0:13.2	with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
0:16.3	And for right reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
0:21.0	I hope you enjoy listening.
0:30.0	Music Radio Music
0:43.3	My cast away this week is molecular biologist Venky Ramakrishnan.
0:47.6	The pioneering work he has done in his field has earned him a Nobel Prize for chemistry,
0:51.9	a knighthood and India's Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian honour the country can bestow.
0:57.9	He's also president of the Royal Society.
1:00.4	It wasn't the most straightforward path to scientific success, however.
1:04.4	Back in the 1970s, he was a young, dissatisfied physicist who by his own admission
1:09.9	did almost everything except buckle down and do his work.
1:13.3	It was after he made the switch to biology that he found his calling,
1:16.6	an article in Scientific American captured his imagination,
1:20.4	beginning what would become a career long quest and towards the end and out and out race
1:25.4	to map the atomic structure of the mother of all molecules,
1:28.8	the machine that turns the blueprint of life into life itself, the ribosome.
1:33.7	Of his discovery, he says, the excitement of building a structure cannot be exaggerated.
1:39.5	Until that point, the molecule is a black box.
1:42.8	You know it exists and what it does, not a lot more.
	...

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