Venkatraman Ramakrishnan - Problems Quotes

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I think it is the ability to tackle difficult problems in a sort of stable and supportive environment. I think that is the real key to it.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
It takes a certain amount of courage to tackle very hard problems in science, I now realise. You don't know what the timescale of your work will be: decades or only a few years. Or your approach may be fatally flawed and doomed to fail. Or you could get scooped just as you are finalising your work. It is very stressful.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
You would have to ask a physicist really but I think understanding fundamental problems in physics is very important because they are part of our culture. You just never know what is going to come from it. If you had told Isaac Newton about spaceships and satellites that arise from his laws of gravity, it would have been science fiction to him.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
The ribosome does amazing chemistry, but I'm not a chemist…I've just learnt enough to work on my problem.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
I remember reading a Scientific American article about the use of new physical techniques – including neutron scattering – as a method for unravelling the structure of the ribosome. I was fascinated. I knew ribosomes were a big fundamental problem in science and this was a method for chipping away at it.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
This reconnection... has given me great satisfaction. I realise I have inadvertently become a source of inspiration and hope for people in India simply by the fact that I grew up there, went to my local university, but could go on to do well internationally. The Nobel, he says, is not just an affirmation of his past work; it's an encouragement to keep working on interesting problems.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
Find out what really fascinates you and follow that. Almost anything in nature, if you follow it, you will find a scientific problem. That is a better way to do it than following fads, because what is fashionable today may have been solved or fallen out of fashion once you have become a working scientist.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan