Indian born scientist gets Nobel Prize in Chemistry

In a rare honor for Indian scientific community, Indian-born American scientist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the year 2009. Ramakrishnan and two other scientists won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their "studies of the structure and function of the ribosomes". The two other scientists, who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with V Ramakrishnan are Thomas E Steitz (US) and Ada E Yonath (Israel). They all are working with MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was born in 1952 at Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu. He did B.Sc. in Physics from Baroda University in 1971 and his Ph.D. in Physics from Ohio University in 1976.
They were awarded for their study of one of life's core processes: the ribosome's translation of DNA information into life. Ribosomes produce proteins, which in turn control the chemistry in all living organisms. The three scientists were awarded for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. 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.