Venkatraman Ramakrishnan’s Risky Path from Physics to Nobel

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was born in India and moved between countries as a child.

He sometimes felt like an outsider and did not always succeed in school.

He failed to enter two institutions he hoped to attend, but won a scholarship to study physics.

During his doctoral work, he decided that biology interested him more than physics.

He began studying ribosomes, tiny machines inside cells that help make proteins.

In 1995, he moved to Cambridge and accepted a large pay cut to work on this difficult problem.

His team eventually helped reveal the ribosome’s structure and how some antibiotics attach to it.

In 2009, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work.

Later, he wrote about aging, death and the limits of promises made by the longevity industry.