Ramakrishnan in his lab. (Amit Roy)

Cambridge, Oct. 17: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, seems happy and settled in Cambridge, where autumn has set in and where the Nobel laureate can admire ancient trees with leaves turning to russet and mauve and gold as he cycles to work every day.

But over the past four decades, he has led an itinerant existence. Fame has come at a price.

“Many universities have claimed me and many institutions… the University of Utah has claimed me, Yale University has claimed me, Ohio University has claimed me, that is perfectly understandable…. Baroda University is proud of me,” the 57-year-old Ramakrishnan says. “That’s fine because they all contributed to my development at different stages in my career so I am perfectly happy with that.”

Sitting in his tiny office in the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, Ramakrishnan laughs about a professor who confused him with someone else and had said that the winner of the Chemistry Nobel was his student once at Annamalai University.

“Venki”, as Ramakrishnan is known, now takes an indulgent view of how the professor might have been persuaded that he had been one of his students. “I now feel a bit sorry for this old man who somehow (might have been) harassed by reporters and he may have found it hard to remember — my name is fairly common in south India – so they told him, ‘Look, he was your student,’ and he may have struggled to remember and I don’t actually blame him really for it.”

There will be plenty of opportunity for Ramakrishnan to correct these mistakes when he visits India.

“I was hoping to go sometime this winter,” he tells The Telegraph. “I have a visiting professorship at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and I have also promised the University of Madras that I would come and talk to them the next time I came to India. Those are two places I would definitely want to go. Now I may want to go and visit Baroda which is where I grew up. It is not clear whether I will be able to do that this time or whether I will have to go there some other time.”

Since he went abroad at 19, he has been back in India on numerous occasions to lecture and meet other biochemists to discuss his field – the Ribosome – but these were low-profile trips that went unreported.

Now, he knows he will face an avalanche of questions: Did his parents influence him? Could he not have done his work in India? Would it have been possible for him to do his work in India? Is the prize, which he shares with Thomas Steitz of Yale University and Ada Yonath from the Weizmann Institute in Israel, also an honour for India?

“My parents were both scientists and it is clear that they indirectly influenced me,” he acknowledges. “My mother died two years ago and my father and sister live in Seattle.”

His father Prof C.V. Ramakrishnan, a former distinguished biochemist, had met and his married his wife, the late Prof R. Rajalakshmi, in Chidambaram. Ramakrishnan’s sister, Lalita, is now an assistant professor of microbiology and medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Unlike many top scientists, Ramakrishnan says he did not have a privileged upbringing.

“Let me be honest,” he says. “I did not go to very famous schools. I graduated from Baroda University which was a very good university but many people (who are well known today in India) went to the IITs or they went to Delhi University or things like that.

“I got a very good education in Baroda because of some professors who had brought in a truly modern physics course from the US and I was the first year that they tried it out and so they were full of enthusiasm for this new way of teaching. So I ended up getting an education comparable to what I would have got in the US as a result of these few dedicated teachers.”

Next stop was Ohio. “I left for the US but I left after my Bachelor’s rather than my Master’s which is what most Indians do. I had not taken the GRE (an entrance exam for graduate school in the US). I got into a university which is not a very well known university for research. It is called Ohio University.”

He describes Ohio. “It is a smallish university that concentrates mostly on graduate teaching although it does have some research. I did physics there and then I had to switch from physics to biology (after reading articles about biology in Scientific American) so that is when I went to University of California San Diego which is a big major research university. Those two years where I did that transition were actually crucial for me.”

Yale came next. “I did not feel like plunging into a particular lab without getting a broad background in biology and that is where I spent those two years at UCSD and then what I did was go to a post doctoral fellowship at Yale University. That was in 1978 and that’s where under Peter Moore I got my introduction to Ribosomes and I have been working on Ribosomes ever since, entirely or partly.”

The move to Cambridge was preceded by a spell in Utah. “I started the work (on Ribosomes) in Utah. It was an excellent place in some ways. Utah just had a Nobel Laureate two years ago with Mario Capecchi (distinguished professor of human genetics and biology) who figured out how to knock out genes in mice. It was an excellent place, (with) very good colleagues.”

But he worried about the American system of allocating grants for relatively short periods.

“I think the problem was I was not sure how long it (the research into Ribosomes) would take and I was unwilling to risk it on the three to five year funding cycle of grants – I found I could not do other things and the Ribosome at the same time,” he emphasises. “It was too hard a problem so I had to drop everything and focus on the Ribosome but then if I did that and then, three years into the thing, I had nothing, then I would be in a bad situation. I wanted to get on with the really central question in this field rather than hedge my bets by having little projects. Those would be distractions. I would never actually make progress.”

There was only one place in the world he really wanted to be – the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge – where he would be allowed to get on with his work. “It was a crucial decision that involved many things. I decided I’d have to move again after having been in Utah only a few years. It was 1999.”

When he had spent a sabbatical in Cambridge in 1991, “I did not know that I would return but I did not apply anywhere else for a sabbatical. This is the only place I wanted to come to do a sabbatical because I felt it was special and I could learn more here than anywhere else. When I came here initially I was surprised because the building is rundown, there is all this stuff in the corridor, it does not look very posh compared to many American labs.”

“It is only after I had been here for a couple of months that I realised that it was really very easy to work here,” he goes on. “Everything was set up, there were lots of terrific infrastructure, there were people washing glassware, people running the computing so you could just focus on your science and everything mysteriously worked around you to make that happen. Of course, it doesn’t happen by accident: it is because the people who found the lab planned it that way.”

The style suited him, particularly the interaction with colleagues. “(It is) very easy. In America if you wanted to visit a fellow full professor, you would have to make an appointment well in advance. In most cases, they would be busy with teaching, committee work, scheduling their work or be out of town. Here, I can just walk into anyone’s office just about any time and they would be willing to talk to me. That is amazing.”

He loves the Cambridge life. “You have come here and you realise all the great work that has gone on in this lab and you don’t feel like working on something mundane and sort of pedestrian. You feel internally that you have got to do something important and that is an internal psychological pressure of this place because of its tradition and history.”

Could he have done his work in India?

The answer is yes and no – because of the lack of equipment such as Synchrotrons that are expensive but essential for doing experiments to understand the crystalline properties of the Ribosome.

“It would be hard, not the crystallisation part so much – although the amount of stuff we use is really very, very expensive.

“But there is money in science (in India) so that part could have been done. However, it requires these very powerful X-ray sources, called Synchrotrons. Unlike many protein crystallography projects where you can go to a Synchrotron and collect your data and that’s it, we have to make repeated visits to Synchrotrons. So, for instance, my Indian colleagues fly to France or Germany or Japan to collect their Synchrotron data. If you had to fly once a month or once every two weeks from India to France it would just disrupt the whole schedule. It would make it very, very difficult.

“But other than that there is no real reason why it couldn’t be done (in India) and the Synchrotron situation is changing in that you can now send crystals by Fedex and someone at the Synchrotron would collect the data for you. That sort of mechanism will help Indian scientists quite a lot because it means they don’t have to take this arduous flight and go across several time zones to collect their data and come back.”

He also realises the importance of accidents and luck when it comes to working at the frontiers of human knowledge. “People don’t realise that very little of this (making breakthroughs) is innate ability. Innate ability counts for something but you need these lucky accidents, you need good teachers who train you properly, you need mentors who launch your career and teach you how to do research and how to think and then you need luck.

“You try experiments and you need a few lucky breaks and then at a later stage you really need very, very good students and post docs who are keen and motivated to carry forward the work. Without them, nothing would actually happen.”

(Concluding part tomorrow: The race to crack the secrets of the Ribosome)