No, because I started working on ribosomes when I was a post doc, in 1978, when it would have been impossible, really, to solve it. But, it was just a fundamental problem in biology. And we felt, no matter, anything we do to chip away at the problem would be useful. So it was more that that attracted me. And I think the fact that it was large and kind of difficult to come to grips with, yes, it was attractive. Really what was attractive was that it was a fundamental problem.
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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
Structural biologist; Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 2009
India / United Kingdom · b. 1952
Science and medicine
About
Structural biologist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Trained as a theoretical physicist before moving to biology, and shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. Served as President of the Royal Society from 2015 to 2020.
3 answers
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