Quotes from Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

I'm very grateful to have had many brilliant students and post-docs who have worked with me. Potential is often hard to spot, but a key factor is whether they express a genuine interest in the problem and how they have thought about it.

There's a perception out there that the U.K. has become unfriendly to immigrants. Even if that isn't true, the very fact that that is the perception will make people not even want to come.

Like the women in my family, I've found the women in my lab a hard-nosed, ambitious lot who have gone on to be faculty members at top universities. In my own family, it is my father who is prone to bursting into tears.

I think we are intrinsically prone to being irrational and superstitious. A lot of it comes from our fear of the unknown and the fear of a lack of control over our fate.

Science today is a highly collaborative exercise, and to convert it into a contest, as the Nobel does, is a bad way to look at science.

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.

Science is an international enterprise where discoveries in one part of the world are useful in other parts.

My mother, R. Rajalakshmi, taught at Annamalai University in Chidambaram, and during the day, I was well cared for by aunts and grandparents in the usual way of an extended Indian family.

The success in the determination of the high-resolution structures of ribosomal subunits and eventually the whole ribosome was the culmination of decades of effort.

I had an excellent math and physics teacher in high school named T.C. Patel, and in the university, I had truly dedicated professors in both physics and mathematics who gave me a sound foundation with which to pursue graduate studies.

It takes a certain amount of courage to tackle very hard problems in science, I now realise. You don't know what the timescale of your work will be: decades or only a few years.

It's for scientists to lay out the data and lay out what they think, and then it's for the public to make up its own mind. We don't live in a priesthood where some small group imposes its views on other people - that's not the way that science works, and it's not the way a democratic society should work.