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‘Venky’ and his Nobel team Joint winner of the 2009 chemistry Nobel Prize Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, sits in his lab at the Medical Research Council Lab in Cambridge, England, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2009.
— AP/PTI Prof Yash
Pal THIS UNIVERSE Trends
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‘Venky’ and his Nobel team At tea time, at Cambridge’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology, on October 7, something a little stronger than the usual brew was being glugged by the As the test tubes continued to bubble away downstairs, champagne corks flew. An afternoon party was in full swing to celebrate yet another Nobel Prize success for Britain’s most successful research lab. At the centre of festivities was a man who symbolises the international spirit of science n an Indian-born physicist who became an American citizen but has made Britain his professional home. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, known simply as “Venki” to his friends and colleagues, yesterday became the laboratory’s 13th Nobel laureate in its distinguished history. The LMB, often described as Britain’s factory for Nobel gold medals, can trace its biological roots back to the discovery of the DNA double helix in 1953 by Francis Crick and Jim Watson, two of the lab’s previous prize-winners. Venki shares the Nobel prize in chemistry with Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and Thomas Steitz of Yale University. All three made seminal discoveries working out the three-dimensional atomic arrangement of the ribosome n nanoscopic-sized structures inside every living cell that translate the four-letter language of DNA into the physical reality of the many diverse proteins of life. Understanding the form and function of these ribosomes has been crucial to the discovery of new antibiotics, because so many of these wonder drugs work by blocking the action of bacterial ribosomes, thereby killing the germs while leaving the human ribosomes of the patient still functioning. “The laureates of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry have forged an understanding at the atomic level of how nature can transform something as simple as a four-letter code into something as complicated as life itself,” said the Swedish Academy of Sciences, which oversees the prize. “Research driven by curiosity can also, as so many times before, be of practical use. This time it proves useful in the search for new antibiotics.” The mid-morning and afternoon tea breaks at the LMB, which is funded directly by the Medical Research Council, are a tradition dating back to the great, late Max Perutz, another Nobel laureate and former laboratory director whose wife Gisela managed the canteen more than half a century ago. It is a time when the scientists can look up from their microscopes, emerge from their fume cupboards and engage in scholarly, or not-so-scholarly, banter with their colleagues. Yesterday, as so often when the lab wins a Nobel, it turned into a riotous celebration. “I remember once coming back to the lab after Fred Sanger won his second Nobel [in 1980],” said Richard Henderson, another former director who still works at the LMB. “It was 7.30pm and there were at least a hundred people still in the canteen n and Fred was the only person still standing.” Venki spent yesterday morning on the telephone after receiving the news from Stockholm, Dr Henderson said. Many colleagues were not surprised by his prize n he had been tipped to win ever since he published his detailed 3D map of a ribosome sub-unit. “These Nobel parties have always been organised by the same man, the technician who worked with Max Perutz in the 1950s,”
Dr Henderson said. Working out the detailed structural map of the ribosome helped to understand how this vital element of cells is able to make proteins from the building blocks of amino acids. These miniature protein factories are estimated to make just one mistake in every 100,000 amino acids, working at a manufacturing rate of 20 chemical bonds per second. Yesterday, before he went into the tea-time gathering, Venki issued a short statement acknowledging his colleagues and the LMB, which has given its many distinguished scientists the freedom to pursue curiosity-driven research. — By arrangement with
The Independent
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THIS UNIVERSE Why does sky appear blue? I answered this question nearly two years ago: You must have found that white light can be split up into colours when passed through a prism. Not only the prism that school children have in their school laboratory, but also many other materials, including dew drops and cut diamonds. We also see these colours in rainbows. Physically colour is a rough indicator of the wavelength of light. Red light has about twice the wavelength of deep blue. It is experimentally found and theoretically established in scattering with air molecules the blue part of the sunlight scatters about eight times more than the red light. When we turn our face to the sky what we see is this scattered light, which is dominated by blue. Indeed what we call the sky is nothing but this blue scatter. If there were no scattered light the sky would be black — as it is in space. In fact we would also see the stars during the day! I might mention two other things you must have noticed. Around sunset the sun looks orange coloured. At that time the light of the sun has to travel through a long path through the atmosphere. There is a lot of scattering in the atmosphere and the component of light scattered out is mostly short wave lengths, namely the blue colour. Robbed of the blue, and some green, the remaining light is only orange or red. What is the mechanism of water which we have found on moon? Is it water or hydroxyl ion we have found it on poles or on the surface of moon? As I understand the Chandrayaan experiment detected the presence of OH and water molecules in the two millimetre thick top layer of the moon and mostly towards high latitudes of the moon. The suggestion is that this water is produced in interactions of solar wind protons with material of the sun. Since the concentration increases near the poles of the moon it is surmised that this water might have crept into the permanently shaded caves near the poles. The Earth owes its origin to the Sun.
Why does it not have
hydrogen as a main constituent? Lot of hydrogen on earth surface is locked up in water. The size of the earth is not big enough to hold gaseous hydrogen through its gravitational attraction — it must have escaped. Readers wanting to ask Prof Yash Pal a question can e-mail him at palyash.pal@gmail.com |
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Huge new ring spotted around Saturn WASHINGTON:
Scientists have spotted a huge new ring around Saturn—the largest planetary ring seen yet in the solar system. The faint ring, made of tiny particles, partly marks the orbit of Saturn’s distant moon Phoebe, Anne Verbiscer of the University of Virginia and colleagues reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Nobel prize shows need for funding WASHINGTON:
Ada Yonath, one of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, talked the U.S. government into spending $4.7 million on her research that eventually involved a Dead Sea salt-loving microbe. Thomas Steitz of Yale University, a co-winner of the prize, got $10 million to pursue his research. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of Britain’s Medical Research Council received more than $2 million.
France ready to hand back Egyptian murals PARIS:
France is ready to hand back five fragments of ancient Egyptian tomb wall paintings acquired by the Louvre museum between 2000 and 2003, Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand said on Wednesday. Egypt’s Supreme Council for Antiquities had asked France to give back the murals and after extensive discussions between the two sides, Mitterrand said he had called a meeting of the French national museum scientific committee.
Communication pioneers win physics Nobel STOCKHOLM:
A pioneer in fiber optics and two scientists who figured out how to turn light into electronic signals—work that paved the way for the Internet age—were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday. Charles Kao, a Shanghai-born British-American, won half the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.4 million) prize for a discovery that led to a breakthrough in fiber optics, determining how to transmit light over long distances via optical glass fibers.
Taking Russia into nanoworld MOSCOW:
Russian economic reform architect Anatoly Chubais hopes to marshal oligarch investment into establishing Russia as a world leader in high-tech nanoscience, helping wean his country off dependency on raw material sales. Chubais has a reputation for getting seemingly impossible things done. Skeptics, however, say Russian science is hindered by bureaucracy and by a lack of small companies capable of translating scientific ideas quickly into commercial production.
US trio wins medicine Nobel for telomerase STOCKHOLM:
Three Americans won the Nobel prize for medicine on Monday for revealing the existence and nature of telomerase, an enzyme that helps prevent the fraying of chromosomes that underlies aging and cancer. Australian-born Elizabeth Blackburn, British-born Jack Szostak and Carol Greider won the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.42 million), Sweden’s Karolinska Institute said.
CO2 link to Antarctic ice cap origin SINGAPORE:
A team of scientists studying rock samples in Africa has shown a strong link between falling carbon dioxide levels and the formation of Antarctic ice sheets 34 million years ago. The results are the first to make the link, underpinning computer climate models that predict both the creation of ice sheets when CO2 levels fall and the melting of ice caps when CO2 levels rise. —
Reuters
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By Steve Connor
