Indian-born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 along with Thomas E Steitz of the US and Ada E Yonath of Israel for their studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. Announcing this today the Nobel Committee said in its citation that all three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.<br/><br/>The three Laureates have generated 3D models that show how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome. These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity's suffering.<br/><br/>Born in 1952 in Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is now a senior scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge. He earned his B.Sc. in Physics from Baroda University and his Ph.D. in Physics from Ohio University. Later, he moved into biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he took a year of classes, then conducted research with Dr Mauricio Montal, a membrane biochemist.<br/><br/>Better known as Venky among friends, Ramakrishnan started out as a theoretical physicist. After graduate school, he designed his own 2-year transition from physics to biology.<br/><br/>As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, he worked on a neutron-scattering map of the small ribosomal subunit of E Coli. He has been studying ribosome structure ever since. Ramakrishnan has authored several important papers in academic journals.