London - Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, the Indian-born scientist and joint recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry, responded with typical modesty to the award Wednesday. In a statement from Britain's Cambridge University, where he has been working since 1999, Ramakrishan said that winning the accolade was the result of a "highly collaborative enterprise" supported by his "brilliant associates" in Britain and the US.
Ramakrishan was born in Chidambaranm, India, in 1952, but later became a US national. He shares the prize with fellow-American Thomas A Steitz and Israel's Ada Yonath for the study of the structure and function of the ribosome - the cell's protein factory.
"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," he said.
The long term basic research in which he was involved had already led to "breakthroughs" as the ribosome was "starting to show its medical importance," he said.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University said it was "delighted" that Ramakrishan's work had been recognized in a "reflection of the excellent work that our scientists do."
Ramakrishan, who is better known as "Venky" among his colleagues and friends, joins a list of several Nobel laureates at the laboratory.
He came to Britain from the US in 1999, joining the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology which he has co-led since 2006.
He was elected a senior research fellow at Cambridge's prestigious Trinity College last year.
Ramakrishnan earned his B.Sc in physics studies from Baroda University in India in 1971, followed by a Ph.D in Physics from Ohio University in 1976.
He moved into biology at the University of California, San Diego, from where he graduated in 1978 and did research work with Mauricio Montal, a membrane biochemist.
From 1978 to 1982, Ramakrishnan worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the department of chemistry at Yale University, where he worked on a neutron-scattering map of the small ribosomal subunit of E Coli.
After his postdoctoral fellowship, Ramakrishan joined the biology department of Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US where he worked as a biophysicist between 1983 and 1995.
There, he began his collaboration with Stephen White to clone the genes for several ribosomal proteins and determine their three-dimensional structures.
Between 1995 and 1999, he was a Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Utah before moving to Britain.
He was elected a foreign member of the Indian National Science Academy in 2008 and is a fellow of Britain's Royal Society.
His many awards include the 2007 Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the Heatley Medal of the British Biochemical Society and Datta Medal and Lecture awarded in Vienna in 2007.
