Israeli scientist Ada Yonath with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan in his Cambridge laboratory a month before they were named winners of the 2009 Nobel for chemistry, along with Thomas Steitz of Yale. Picture courtesy: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Cambridge, Oct. 18: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan had raced two others in his bid to unlock the secret of ribosomes, the cell’s “protein factory”, and all three shared this year’s Chemistry Nobel. So how had the chemistry been between him and rivals Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath?

Ramakrishnan is frank: “Science is done by people; we have egos, we have rivalries.”

With Israel’s Yonath, for example, he is now on amicable terms but “not through the entire time”. But he pays tribute to “her pioneering contribution”. The Royal Swedish Academy calls Yonath the “pioneer” who, in the end-’70s, decided to try and generate X-ray crystallographic structures of the ribosome, something people thought impossible. She made a breakthrough in 1980 but more work needed to be done and “more scientists joined in the race”.

Ramakrishnan says: “It is clear that Ada began the effort but it is not clear she would have been able to do it alone —otherwise obviously they would not have given the two of us, Tom and me, the prize.”

He adds: “Tom and I have always been rivals but very friendly. I am a consultant for his antibiotic design company, which he founded. I have known him since I was a post-doctoral Fellow at Yale where he is a professor, and his collaborator was my post-doctoral mentor — Peter Moore. That is how I got into ribosomes.”

With Yonath, it was different. “I think she found it difficult initially that in a field that she had to herself for a long time, suddenly she had these competitors. It is absolutely true Ada did the early efforts but I think it is fair to say that Tom and I made very important contributions to finish the job and also explain aspects of how the ribosome works. So in that sense it is collaborative.

“But that does not mean it is personally collaborative. We can be rivals but still collaborators in a sense because we are reading the other person’s papers, getting ideas on what is the next step.

“This makes it sound a bit opportunistic. I think Tom and I had somewhat different ideas of how to go about it, and realised the technology had advanced to the point where we could implement them.”

With Yonath, therefore, “there were times when we were rather hostile. That is in the nature of science that when you are in a very tight race with someone, you are competitors…. I think that is unfortunate but that is human nature. We want to know the answer but we also want to know the answer before anyone else. That is part of what drives us,” Ramakrishnan says.

“So things were a little bit tense for a good two or three years. But eventually we settled down. I invited her to give a talk here (at his Cambridge lab) in September. Actually, I have a picture.”

On his computer screen, he calls up a photograph of the two of them together. “We are now friends who share an interest in the problems of peace in the Middle East,” he says.

So what did the trio actually do? The Swedish Academy gives the immediate picture as well as a broader, historical one, drawing a line from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, through Francis Crick and James Watson, who discovered the double helix of the DNA (in the same Cambridge lab where Ramakrishnan works), through to this year’s Nobel trio.

Darwin’s 1859 theory, the Nobel citation says, was “based on the assumption that an organism’s properties are hereditary” but gave rise to the questions: what exactly is being transferred over generations, where do the random changes occur, and how can they manifest themselves in a living organism?

“The 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry is the third in a series of prizes that show how Darwin’s theories actually function at the level of the atom,” the academy says. The trilogy begins with the 1962 Nobel to Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins. The second prize… was awarded in 2006 to Roger D. Kornberg for X-ray structures that explicate how information is copied to the messenger RNA molecule” — an intermediate stage before the ribosome starts making protein molecules.

This year’s winners, the citation says, studied “the ribosome’s translation of DNA information” to produce proteins, which control the chemistry in all living organisms. They have shown “what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level”.

Since ribosomes are crucial to life, new antibiotics seek to attack bacteria’s ribosomes, and this is where the immediate application of the trio’s work lies.

How does Ramakrishnan rate himself?

He puts Crick in a category all his own. “I think Crick was just an amazing genius,” he says. “I think in molecular biology many of us are competent scientists who persist away at a problem and we are lucky in that we have very good students and post-docs and so on. But Crick was in a special category because he was a deep thinker and that’s rare.”

Others have since come in. “Think of it as a baton race, a relay race.”