44 Quotes by Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

We live in an increasingly technological world where the issues are quite complex and based on some complicated science.

You can only go into science because you're interested in it.

During the decade following the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, the problem of translation - namely, how genetic information is used to synthesize proteins - was a central topic in molecular biology.

Governments and scientists in India need to ensure that politics and religious ideology do not intrude into science. They belong to separate spheres, and if they are not kept separate, it is science in India and the country as a whole that will suffer.

I am very grateful for the dedicated work and intellectual contributions of generations of talented postdocs, students and research assistants without whom none of the work from my laboratory would have been possible.

I knew the ribosome was going to be the focus of Nobel prizes. It stands at the crossroads of biology, between the gene and what comes out of the gene. But I had convinced myself I was not going to be a winner.

I realise I have inadvertently become a source of inspiration and hope for people in India simply by the fact that I grew up there, went to my local university, but could go on to do well internationally.

I remember reading a 'Scientific American' article about the use of new physical techniques - including neutron scattering - as a method for unravelling the structure of the ribosome. I was fascinated.

I started working on ribosomes when I was a post doc, in 1978, when it would have been impossible, really, to solve it. But, it was just a fundamental problem in biology.