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Indian American shares Nobel for chemistry London, October 7 Ramakrishnan (57), who hails from the temple town of Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu, will share $1.4 million award with Thomas Steitz of the US and Ada Yonath of Israel. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said three-dimensional models developed by the three scientists showed how different antibiotics bind to ribosomes. "These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity's suffering," the academy said in its citation. An elated Ramakrishnan, the seventh Indian or of Indian origin to get the award, said: "I have to say that I am deeply indebted to all of the brilliant associates, students and post docs who worked in my lab as science is a highly collaborative enterprise." The other Nobel awardees are Rabindranath Tagore (Literature), CV Raman (Physics), Hargobind Khorana (Medicine and Physiology), Subramaniam Chandrasekar (Physics), Amartya Sen (Economics) and VS Naipaul (Literature). After his graduation in physics from Baroda University in 1971, Ramakrishnan left for the US where he did his Ph.D in the same subject from Ohio University in 1976 and has been associated with Cambridge University for the past 14 years. As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, he worked on a neutron-scattering map of the small ribosomal subunit of E Coli. He has been studying ribosome structure ever since. "The MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the University of Utah supported this work (on ribosome) and the collegiate atmosphere there made it all possible," Ramakrishnan said. "The idea of supporting long term basic research like that at LMB does lead to breakthroughs, the ribosome is already starting to show its medical importance," he said. The Academy, in its citation, said all three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.Ramakrishnan is currently a senior scientist and group leader at the Structural Studies Division of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. Steitz, a 69-year-old, is a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University. Yonath is a professor of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and the ninth Israeli to win a Nobel prize. — PTI Prez pat for Venkataraman
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