Venkatraman Ramakrishnan won the Nobel Prize in 2009 in which field?

Venkatraman "Venki" Ramakrishnan, an Indian-born American-British structural biologist, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009.

About the Nobel Prize:

He shared the prize with Thomas A. Steitz (USA) and Ada E. Yonath (Israel) "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome".

The ribosome is the molecular machine inside every cell that reads the genetic information in messenger RNA (mRNA) and uses it to make proteins.

Using a technique called X-ray crystallography, the three scientists mapped the structure of the ribosome at the level of individual atoms.

Their work showed how the ribosome works and helped scientists develop new antibiotics, many of which act by blocking bacterial ribosomes.

About Venki Ramakrishnan:

• He was born in 1952 in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu.
• He grew up in Vadodara, Gujarat, and studied physics at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.
• He earned a PhD in physics from Ohio University, USA, and then switched to biology.
• He worked at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK.
• He was President of the Royal Society, London, from 2015 to 2020, the first person of Indian origin to hold the post.
• He received the Padma Vibhushan in 2010 and was knighted in the UK in 2012.
• He wrote "Gene Machine" (2018), about the race to understand the ribosome, and "Why We Die" (2024).

Other Nobel laureates of Indian origin in science:

• Har Gobind Khorana: Physiology or Medicine (1968), for work on the genetic code.
• Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar: Physics (1983), for work on the structure and evolution of stars (Chandrasekhar limit).
• V. Raman: Physics (1930), the only Indian citizen to win a science Nobel.
• Abhijit Banerjee: Economics (2019).

Why not the other options?

Physics was won by C. V. Raman (1930) and S. Chandrasekhar (1983).

Physiology or Medicine was won by Har Gobind Khorana (1968).

Economics was won by Amartya Sen (1998) and Abhijit Banerjee (2019).