Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A Steitz and Ada E Yonath for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level," the Nobel committee said in its citation.

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, it said.

"This year's three Laureates have all 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," the citation said.
 He may have migrated to the US long back, but Indian-American Venkatraman Ramakrishnan  made a billion people back home proud by winning the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his pioneering work on ribosome, a cellular machine that makes proteins.

57-year-old Ramakrishnan, born in the temple town of Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu, is the seventh Indian or of Indian origin to win the prestigious award.

He earned his Ph.D in Physics from Ohio University in the US and later worked as a graduate student at the University Ramakrishnan, now a senior scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge has authored several important papers in academic journals.  of California from 1976-78.