Ramakrishnan dances with his wife Vera Rosenberry on Thursday night

Stockholm, Dec. 11: Nobel prizes in chemistry, physics, physiology or medicine and economics are unlikely to be awarded to lone individuals in the future, a senior Swedish government official has said.

He was explaining why Indian-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of Cambridge had shared his Nobel for chemistry with Thomas Steitz of Yale and Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute in Israel.

“Science is a collaborative effort,” said Claus Jernaeus, director for foreign press at the Swedish foreign ministry who has this week been looking after overseas journalists who have come to Stockholm to cover Nobel week.

With a shrug of her shoulders, Yonath admitted: “We three are the lucky ones to be chosen but there are others who have been working in this field who also deserve to be here. But the Nobel committee chose us three.”

Yesterday’s prize giving ended at night with a candle-lit banquet at the City Hall in honour of the laureates, attended by King Carl XVI Gustaf and other members of the Swedish royal family. It was laced with musical interludes, operatic snatches and pretty girls.

Ranks of waiters marched the stairs in military fashion as though filming for something like Stars Wars. And there were flowers everywhere, worth noting since Sweden cannot grow any of its own during winter.

“Extravagant,” was Ramakrishnan’s word for it, as family, friends and “the ribosome people”, as he called the many colleagues who have working in his field, crowded round his gold medal and citation put on display in the Golden Hall upstairs after the formal banquet had ended.

The chocolates, covered in gold-coloured wrapping paper with an embossed image of Alfred Nobel and scattered on the dining tables, did not look that different from Ramakrishnan’s actual gold medal.

The citation cannot easily be reproduced for these are not mass produced printed documents but individually handwritten by expert calligraphers employed by the Nobel organisation.

Ramakrishnan, in tails and white tie — hired despite being a Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge — was much happier discussing the finer points of how his beloved ribosomes convert DNA codes into the proteins that make life. But to the delight of family members, his wife, Vera Rosenberry, finally persuaded cajoled him on to the dance floor.

His son, Raman, a physicist turned cello player, and married to Melissa, a viola player — she was due to leave immediately for Mumbai for a music festival — had flown in from America.

“It’s awesome,” was how Raman described the honour heaped on his father. “Dad has been very generous and spoken in public about buying me a new cello (with his share of the $1.4m prize money).”

Ramakrishnan’s sister, Lalita, who wore a green sari which had once belonged to her late mother, is a microbiologist who has apparently just submitted an important paper of her own.

Her husband, Mark Troll, joked: “She is seven years younger. We said there was competition between her and Venki. So she has bought him a yellow jersey.”

This was an esoteric joke which refers to the Tour de France cycle race in which the leader traditionally wears a yellow jersey.

Recalling the day’s events, Ramakrishnan said he had bowed from the hip, not from the shoulders as other laureates had done, when accepting his prize from the king.

“That is the right way of bowing,” he advised. “I learnt it from watching movies.”

The Nobel organisation is painstaking in its efforts to ensure the standard of winners remains of the highest calibre. It also imbues the social side of Nobel week with high profile lectures, receptions, cocktail parties, lunches and dinners, culminating with a gala banquet — events which it feels essential for the pursuit of scientific research.

Being vegetarian Ramakrishnan steered clear of the exquisite fish and poultry dishes fit to set before a king but he appeared not to be bothered. He will be more at home in south India where he is now headed.

Despite growing up in America, his children, Tania and Raman, are also vegetarian.

“They have been brought up that way,” he said.

For the record, for last night’s banquet at City Hall, 37,000 flowers were imported from San Remo, the Italian city where Alfred Nobel died on December 10, 1896 – it was the king who first raised a glass of chilled champagne to him.