Washington, Oct. 7: The phone started ringing at 2am today at the Seattle residence of retired professor C.V. Ramakrishnan.

The callers, mostly from American television networks, wanted to speak to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan.

Annoyed at being woken up from deep sleep, C.V. Ramakrishnan told the first caller that his son had not been living at this Seattle address for 10 years.

“But this is the address from which he renewed his Washington state driving licence,” the caller protested. “This is the address on his US passport,” the television reporter insisted.

C.V. Ramakrishnan, trying to shed the ennui from an abrupt awakening, wondered what it was that the media wanted with his only son at this unearthly hour.

Before he could conjure up any answer, the reporter, realising that C.V. Ramakrishnan did not know the big news that had just broken in Europe, told the father that his son, Indian American Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a professor at Cambridge, had just been announced as one of three winners of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009.

Was this true? Or was this TV reporter trying to trip him up for some other reason? Only for a very fleeting second did C.V. Ramakrishnan have a slight confusion.

He quickly recalled that his wife, the late professor R. Rajalakshmi, used to be absolutely confident that one day their son would be awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in biochemistry.

Her confidence was not that of a doting parent, who, of course, thought highly of her son. Both Rajalakshmi and her husband were thoroughly familiar with the work that their son was engaged in.

Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu-born, Baroda-educated Venkatraman Ramakrishnan comes from a family of biochemists. The family always placed a high premium on education.

Rajalakshmi started her career as a high school teacher in Chidambaram, where Coimbatore-born C.V. Ramakrishnan met and married her. Shortly after they married, the husband left for the US for a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Hargobind Khorana, an Indian American Nobel laureate in 1968, was at the University of Wisconsin–Madison when Khorana was awarded the Nobel for medicine.

Rajalakshmi, who followed her husband to Canada, where he joined the prestigious National Research Council, enrolled at McGill University for a PhD.

Although Rajalakshmi and C.V. Ramakrishnan were doing very well in the West, the pull of the motherland was too strong, even at a time of severe brain drain from India.

In 1955, when the University of Baroda invited C.V. Ramakrishnan to join the leading institution of higher learning in Gujarat, the couple gave up their career in north America and returned home.

Together, C.V. Ramakrishnan and Rajalakshmi not only set up the biochemistry faculty at the University of Baroda, but also won global recognition for their work on the role of nutrition in brain development.

The theories that they developed with generous grants for this pioneering work ran counter to what the West was propagating at that time and helped human development in the Third World.

Their young son was then specialising in physics and had already done his BSc. from the University of Baroda and his PhD. later from Ohio University, both in physics.

But the family’s partiality towards biology and biochemistry eventually overwhelmed him too and the latest Nobel laureate joined Yale as a post-doctoral fellow in the chemistry department.

Other similar openings came his way in the US, but Venkatraman Ramakrishnan chose to move to England because Cambridge offered him an escape from uncertainties in the US that come from having to constantly seek grants for research and not knowing if the funds would actually be available.

Cambridge, on the other hand, offered the Indian American an open sesame for the research he wanted to pursue, which won him the shared Nobel today.

C.V. Ramakrishnan told The Telegraph that he moved to the US in 1996, well after his retirement because Rajalakshmi had a stroke and their daughter, Lalita, now an assistant professor of microbiology and medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle, then a Stanford alumnus, wanted to be with her ailing mother.

Since that first call at 2am today, the phones have not stopped ringing at the residences of Lalita Ramakrishnan and her father. Among the callers were India’s consul-general in San Francisco, Susmita Gongulee Thomas, in whose charge Seattle falls.

Unlike reporters, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was considerate about his father’s sleep and did not call until 5am although it was a cherished day for the entire family.