Tamil Nadu-born Professor Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, the first Indian ever to be awarded the Nobel prize for Chemistry, describes as 'smothering' the attention he has attracted from well wishers in India. But Ramakrishnan, who shares his prize with two others, says his response to the reactions should not be interpreted as arrogance or a reluctance to acknowledge his roots. He also says in his exclusive interview with Shyam Bhatia of asianaffairs that there is excellent work being done in Indian laboratories and it is only a matter of time before Indian science is comparable to science anywhere else.

AA: There is a tradition of science research in your family. Is this something that has contributed to your own academic interests and success in your chosen field?

VR: My father was a professor of biochemistry in Baroda University, Gujarat. I can't link my own work in a very direct way to a family tradition, only in an indirect way in the sense that I grew up in a family where science and that sort of life was respected. Scholarship was respected, so there wasn't this strong pressure that I should go out and make a lot of money. So that probably was an influence. My mother more than my father directly encouraged me to go into basic science.

AA: Is there a uniquely Indian quality of sons following in their father's professional footsteps?

VR: That's true, but it's true in the West too. For instance Roger Kornberg won the Nobel prize two years ago in chemistry. His father had won it roughly 30 years ago, so I think traditions can run in families and I'm not sure it's particularly Indian. Look at the Kennedys or the Bushes.

AA: Were you surprised to find that resources were available in the UK to fund your research?

VR: Well, I actually took a 40 per cent pay cut at the time to move from the U.S. to the UK because the Medical Research Council (MRC) has this — at least through the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) — a long tradition of supporting very long-term basic research. And I felt this was exactly the environment I needed to tackle what I believed was a very hard problem, the ribosome. Places like the LMB are still very special.
You know on a per capita basis, even if you go by Nobel prizes, which I think is a silly criterion because it doesn't measure the true depth of science, even so Britain is very good at holding its own. British science does a lot cheaper I think than U.S. science does.

AA: Could you explain for the layman's benefit what your research has been about and what are its practical applications?

VR: Well, let's tackle the last part first. The practical applications if they come, we're delighted, but as scientists we are fundamentally driven by asking very basic questions about how does life work. That's really what we do. But the paradox is that out of that sort of inquiry very often the most useful applications come out of that curiosity-driven research. Even more so than directed research that has a quick payoff. You know the technologies of the future cannot really be predicted because you need to know the underlying facts before you can develop the technology and that's why basic research is so important. Of course you need a balance. You can't just have basic research and no applications whatsoever, that's a waste of taxpayers' money.

On the other hand, if you don't have basic research, you won't develop the technologies of the future. They're both very important. Coming back to the problem itself, the fundamental problem is that a lot of the work in the cell, a lot of the chemistry in the cell, what makes it a living cell, is done by proteins. The way proteins are made is by using the blueprints that are in DNA. So DNA contains genes, but what genes do is code for information. They contain information to make proteins.

So the question is how do you use that information in DNA to make proteins? It's actually a two step process. The first thing is that the genes in DNA are copied into a working copy of the gene called messenger RNA. That process is called transcription. Roger Kornberg won a Nobel prize for that two years ago, the chemistry prize. But the next step is how to take that still genetic information, although in the form of RNA, and translate it into a different language — which is the language of proteins. RNA and DNA contain a four letter alphabet that consists of four types of building blocks. Proteins contain a 20 letter alphabet; they consist of 20 different types of amino acids, actually a few more but mainly 20.

That's why the process is called translation, this process of making proteins. The process of making this translation is made by this large molecular machine called a ribosome. The problem is that the ribosome in enormous, it consists of over a million atoms and to try to understand how it works, its useful, almost essential, to have a high resolution atomic structure. 

For instance if you had a car engine and you didn't know what it looks like at all, it would be hard for you to understand how it worked. Let's say you were a Martian and you saw these cars moving around and you didn't look in the inside and see how they worked. It would be too abstract. All you could see is that gasoline went in, the thing moved and carbon dioxide was emitted. But you wouldn't be able to tell how exactly it worked.

So what many of us did was to determine the high resolution of the atomic structure of the ribosome and that has led to lots of work and an increased understanding of how it does its job by taking genetic information and using it to make proteins.

AA: Is the ribosome machine a physical apparatus?

VR: It is. It's a large molecule that consumes energy, moves, with about a million atoms. Of course when I say large I mean in molecular terms. In our everyday terms it's tiny.

AA: Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was famously cited for being against basic, pure research like yours and being interested only in applied research.

VR: I was not in Britain at that time but I can tell you that very respected colleagues of mine in Britain, people who know what they're talking about, have told me that Thatcher almost killed off British science. I believe that whatever we may complain about the recent governments and so on, I believe that British science funding has improved in the last decade or so. I think that is a good turn of events and I hope that whatever party is in power will continue that trend of work in science. If you want the country to succeed in technology, new knowhow and so on, you absolutely need that bedrock of support.

I think it's a fair question to ask why should a taxpayer, why should say a farmer in Yorkshire or a lorry driver, have some of their taxes go in this work? I think that's a fair question. If they're not able to answer that, then they have a problem.

This ribosome structure, we did it to understand fundamental molecular biology. But, as it turns out, ribosomes are also the target for huge numbers of natural antibiotics. Once we had the structure we could determine how these natural antibiotics bind to the ribosome and we can now use that information to design better antibiotics. In fact one of my co-winners, Thomas Steitz, has founded a company called Rib-X in the U.S. that is dedicated to producing new antibiotics based on these ribosome structures. They already have compounds in phase two clinical trials; I believe they are moving along to phase three. It looks very promising.

AA: That's fantastic because that's life saving.

VR: Exactly, and the hope is that you can design better antibiotics that not only overcome resistance, but they have less toxic side effects and so on. So this is just an example of how curiosity-driven research can almost immediately lead to application.

AA: What is the next big idea you are working on, will you continue in this area?

VR: Yeah, I'm 57 and I've been working on ribosomes since 1978. That's 31 years and I think it's a little too late for me to jump into a new field and make significant contributions, although anything is possible. But there are plenty of problems left in the ribosome. So if you think of the ribosome as a machine, then these structures are like snap shots of the machine. Machines move and do things and in order to do that, you need snap shots of the machine at different states of the process. You need to construct a movie if you like of the machine at work. So that's one aspect. The other aspect we like to study arises from other kinds of life forms, for instance these structures are mainly from bacteria and what we would like to do is study the ribosomes of higher organisms, the ribosomes of mitochondria. If you have the structure of a higher organism ribosome then you can better design drugs that won't bind to it and be more specific to bacteria. So that's a substantial application, but we're doing it because we're curious about how these ribosomes are different.

AA: Are you still in touch with your Asian roots, do you still care about them?

VR: I have to tell you that I unwittingly walked into a huge controversy. I don't know if you read the Indian press? I was bombarded with emails from India, many from people who don't know me at all. The LMB is a very simple place, it doesn't have the trappings, I don't have a secretary to deal with all my stuff etc. So I found this very difficult and so I complained. I said if people have any consideration — I can see they're taking pride in the event — why are they following me personally? That got printed in every newspaper in India and people accused me of being arrogant, forgetting my roots and so on. Today a member of parliament has written to say that I lack emotional intelligence.

Of course people will take pride in someone who grew up in India going on to do well. But all I was saying was that look, take pride, but don't feel you have to send me an email about it because that email I have to deal with. That's all I was asking.

I've been to India every year since I moved to Britain; when I was in the U.S. I hardly went to India. But now that India is closer, I've been to India every year for the last many years and each time I've spent the majority of my time staying on campus, at institutes, talking to scientists, talking to students and so on. So it's hardly like I've forgotten my roots. So I have to say I'm a little annoyed by this childishness to my request.

The fact is lots of people should take pride in what I've done because they've contributed to it. Not only in India, but people who taught me and trained me in the U.S., the MRC which has supported me and my colleagues at the LMB, but the point is that I don't get random emails from people everywhere I've lived. It's only from India. And it's not a racial thing because my American, native born American Nobel laureates, I've talked to them, and they get emails from old friends and colleagues. They don't get completely unknown people from their home town for instance writing to them  even though they are proud, it's not     that they're not proud of it. They don't feel that urge to send the person an  email.

That smothering attention I found hard to deal with. It's not that new. Apparently somebody sent me a newspaper clipping that had quotes from Rabindranath Tagore in 1908 or something and our responses are almost identical. We just want to do our thing in peace. It shouldn't be over interpreted as anything to do with arrogance or roots.
If India had had 50 Nobel laureates, there wouldn't be this exaggerated reaction. I think it comes from insecurity.
But what I want to say is that India today has no reason to be insecure. It's on the rise. I've been to Indian labs and they're doing excellent work and it's only a matter of time before Indian science is comparable to science anywhere else. I don't want to use the Nobel prizes as a criterion because that's a bit like winning the lottery. There's so much good work out there and there are only three science Nobel prizes. It's impossible to recognise all the good work that's going on. So in that sense it's a bit like winning the lottery. If you just use excellent science as a criterion, India is certainly on its way up.

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