The Physics department had a couple of faculty who had returned from abroad and had modernized the curriculum completely. “The university in those days was still a first-rate institution, famous for many things like its School of Fine Arts. So, how did his time at the university in Vadodara shape his life and career? (Source: Photo: Karthik Ramaswamy/The Better India) Instead, he chose to do his BSc in Physics at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. In some ways, I took this as a sign that it was where my talents were,” recalls Dr Ramakrishnan. Around the same time, I was one of four people from my state (I believe I was the top-ranking in my state) for the National Science Talent Scholarship, which required you to do basic science, i.e. “I don’t remember being particularly disappointed about not getting into the IITs or CMC. Instead, his mother had nudged him towards the National Science Talent Search Scholarship established by the Government of India for students majoring in basic sciences. They didn’t particularly care about this, and in fact did not pay for me to go to any ‘coaching classes’ for the entrance exams, which were typical even then,” says Dr Ramakrishnan, in an email interview with The Better India. But his parents didn’t put any pressure on him to get into these institutions. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)įor many students in his time, there was a certain prestige attached to getting admissions into the IITs. Dr Ramakrishnan at the Nobel Prize Press conference in 2009. After a one-year preparatory course in Science at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, the choices before him were medicine, engineering or basic science. Despite his interest in humanities, studying subjects like English Literature was never an option because of the scientific environment that surrounded him at home. in under 18 months, which must be something of a record,” he writes, following his Nobel Prize win.Īlthough a bright student studying at a Convent school in Vadodara, he struggled through Classes VII to IX before a Science and Mathematics teacher called TC Patel reinvigorated his interest in academics. Probably because she felt guilty about leaving my father and me behind, she finished her Ph.D. in psychology, where one of her mentors was the famous psychologist Donald Hebb, whose theories presaged modern ideas about synaptic plasticity as a basis for memory and behavior. She obtained a fellowship in McGill University to do a Ph.D. “Unusually for an Indian man of his generation, my father, being aware of my mother’s intellectual abilities, encouraged her to go abroad by herself to obtain a Ph.D.
He was only three years old when his parents left the temple town for Vadodara, Gujarat. His father CV Ramakrishnan was a biochemist who would go onto head a new department of biochemistry at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, while his mother R Rajalakshmi taught at Annamalai University in Chidambaram. Venkatraman “Venki” Ramakrishnan (Source: Wikimedia Commons)īorn in 1952 in the temple town of Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, Dr Ramakrishnan grew up in a household of scholars. “As the site within living cells where the genetic information is read to synthesise proteins from amino acids, improved understanding of the ribosome has yielded many fundamental biological insights,” says a description by The Royal Society. Ramakrishnan won the enviable Nobel Prize particularly for his remarkable work on the atomic structure of the ribosome.
But, did you know that before he went on his remarkable sojourn towards the Nobel Prize, he had failed to clear the entrance tests for both the IITs and the Christian Medical College in Vellore? Imagine that! Dr Venkataraman Ramakrishnan, the Indian-born scientist, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for his many scientific contributions.
0 kommentar(er)
