Venkatraman ”Venki” Ramakrishnan is the current President of the Royal Society, UK (2015-20). He shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009 for his work on the atomic structure of the ribosome, and was knighted in 2012. Since 1999 he has worked as a Group Leader at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, UK, and is also a Professor at the University of Cambridge, UK. As ribosomes are the site within living cells where the genetic information is read to synthesise proteins, its improved understanding has yielded many fundamental biological insights. More recently, Venki has been using electron microscopy to visualise ribosomes in action in higher organisms. This work has advanced our understanding of how the ribosome works and how antibiotics inhibit it. In the past he has also worked on histone and chromatin structure, which help us to understand how DNA is organised in cells.
