By IANS,
Thiruvananthapuram : Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Sunday saluted the latest Indian Nobel laureate Venkatraman (Venki) Ramakrishnan for his creativity, talent and commitment to good science.
“All Indians felt proud that an Indian-origin scientist, who earned his early spurs in India, was a recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry,” Singh said, inaugurating the 97th Indian Science Congress here.
Singh also endorsed Ramakrishnan’s recent comment that Indian scientists needed greater autonomy from red tape and local politics.
In this context, the prime minister lamented that red tape, political interference and lack of proper recognition of good work led to regression in Indian science from the days of another Indian Nobel laureate C.V. Raman and other pioneering scientists in the past.
Though Ramakrishnan is presently in India, camping at the renowned Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, organisers of the premier science event – Indian Science Congress Association, hosts Kerala University and the state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) did not invite him for the annual science summit.
“We were not aware about him being still in the country or his itinerary. We knew through media reports that he was in Mumbai and Chennai recently. Had we known that he was in Bangalore, we would have certainly persuaded him to come here,” a senior varsity official told IANS on the margins of the conference.
Ramakrishnan, 57, though a US citizen, was born at Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu and graduated in science from Baroda University in 1971 and did Ph.D in physics from Ohio University in the US in 1976.
He is currently a senior scientist and group leader at structural studies division, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, at Cambridge in Britain.
Ramakrishnan was awarded the Nobel Prize jointly by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences ‘for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome’ along with Thomas E. Steitz of the US and Ada E. Yonath of Israel.
A ribosome translates the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) code into life.