That decision led to his lifelong research on ribosomes, tiny molecular machines that read genetic instructions and build proteins essential for life. In 2009, he and his team were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping the ribosome in atomic detail, transforming understanding of how it works.

Ramakrishnan, or Venki, as he prefers to be called, was born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, southern India in 1952. As a young child, he was largely raised by his grandparents and aunt, as his parents, both scientists, often traveled for research and work.

During secondary school, he fell from being one of the top students to near the bottom of his class, distracted by "playing and reading novels and other extracurricular books," he said in his Nobel Prize biography.

It was only after meeting his mathematics and science teacher, T.C. Patel, that he regained his interest in studying. "A strict disciplinarian," Ramakrishnan said of Patel, "he nevertheless had a twinkle in his eye as he would expose us to clever ideas and difficult problems."

Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan. Photo courtesy of University of Virginia

In his final two years of high school, he made a strong comeback and graduated second in his school. After graduation, he sat entrance exams for the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology, widely seen as India’s top engineering schools, and also applied to Christian Medical College in Vellore, one of the country’s leading medical schools, according to India Today newspaper.

He failed to qualify for admission to either institution. Around the same time, he won the National Science Talent Search Scholarship, which encouraged him to pursue basic science. At 16, he enrolled in physics at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.

Three years later, he moved to the U.S. to pursue a PhD at Ohio University, earning the degree in 1976. But the deeper he went into theoretical physics, the more he felt he had chosen the wrong field. He said one "particularly difficult time" came when he was working on solid-state theory, focusing on ferroelectric phase transitions in potassium dihydrogen phosphate, and struggled to connect with the work. "It was the first time in many years that I felt I had chosen the wrong field."

At the same time, he became increasingly interested in biology through articles in Scientific American magazine. He noticed that major breakthroughs in life sciences seemed to happen almost every month, while physics was struggling to make similar progress.

He then enrolled in the biology department at University of California, San Diego. His decision to switch to biology in his late 20s made him an outsider in the eyes of many.

Starting over in biology

Since he "hardly knew any biology," he said, he had to begin almost from scratch, taking as many undergraduate courses in genetics, biochemistry, and molecular biology as he could manage.

After two years, he believed he had acquired enough preparation in biology to begin postdoctoral research and moved to Yale University, according to the Academy of Achievement. There, he developed a strong interest in ribosomes.

"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," he said in a 2013 interview with The Guardian. "I knew ribosomes were a big fundamental problem in science and this was a method for chipping away at it."

At the time, ribosomes were considered nearly impossible to fully understand. They were too large, too complex, and made up of hundreds of thousands of atoms.

Many scientists believed determining their full structure was beyond reach. Still, Ramakrishnan was drawn to the challenge. For more than 20 years, he worked in laboratories at Oak Ridge Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, the University of Utah, and finally the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.

Indian scientist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan. Photo of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology

In 1999, he and his wife, Vera Rosenberry, moved to Cambridge, living apart from their children so he could focus entirely on solving the structure of the ribosome’s 30S subunit, the part responsible for reading genetic information.

Many considered the project unrealistic. At the time, several major research teams around the world were racing to decode the ribosome. Within months of arriving in Cambridge, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan reported a major breakthrough: the entire central domain of the 30S ribosome subunit. He shocked the audience at an international ribosome conference in Denmark with the findings, which were published in Nature in August 1999.

In early 2000, as Ramakrishnan continued his effort to map the entire 30S subunit, he and his team worked around the clock in 12-hour shifts in a lab, and spent sleepless nights at synchrotron facilities collecting data. When he saw the first clear signals showing the positions of atoms, he danced around the office saying, "We’re going to be famous!"

Within weeks, the team built a complete atomic model of the 30S subunit. For the first time in history, scientists could see in detail how ribosomes function. It changed the field of molecular biology and helped explain how many antibiotics work.

The breakthrough allowed researchers to directly observe where antibiotics bind, helping explain antibiotic resistance and opening the door to designing more effective medicines. In 2009, Ramakrishnan shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath for "mapping the ribosome, one of the cell’s most complex machineries, at the atomic level."

He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of the U.K. in 2012 for services to molecular biology. He also served as president of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest independent scientific academy, from 2015 to 2020, and received India’s Padma Vibhushan, the country’s second-highest civilian honor, in 2010.

Beyond the laboratory, Ramakrishnan has written books for general readers, including "Gene Machine "(2018) and "Why We Die" (2024), sharing his life journey and insights into science.

Reflecting on his career, he said the Nobel Prize could be seen not just as an affirmation of his past work but also as "an encouragement to continue to work on interesting problems."

"Looking back on my life so far, I feel a deep sense of gratitude for having been able to lead such a rich life, both intellectually and personally."