Venki Ramakrishnan: Potential and Risks of Recent Developments in Biotechnology

President, Royal Society Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan is best known for his work on ribosome structure and function, for which he shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The ribosome is the large molecular machine in all cells that reads genetic information to synthesize proteins from amino acids. Improved understanding of the ribosome has yielded many fundamental biological insights and makes possible the development of better antibiotics. He has also worked on histone and chromatin structure, contributing to a better understanding of how DNA is organized in cells. Ramakrishnan grew up in India where he received his bachelor’s degree in physics before moving to the United States. On obtaining his Ph.D. in physics, he switched to molecular biology. After a long career in the U.S., he moved to Cambridge, United Kingdom, where he is a group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Ramakrishnan is a fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.), Leopoldina, and EMBO, and a foreign member of the Indian National Science Academy. He was elected president of the Royal Society in 2015.