Unraveling the structure of the ribosome (Nobel Lecture).

I was born in 1952 in Chidambaram, an ancient temple town in Tamil Nadu best known for its temple of Nataraja, the lord of dance. When I was born, my father, C. V. Ramakrishnan, was away on a postdoctoral fellowship in Madison, Wisconsin, with the famous enzymologist David Green. Because he came from a poor family, he did not think that he could support my mother and me on his postdoctoral income, so he went alone. I often joke that but for this, I would have been born in Madison and could have gone on to become President of the United States. In fact, I first saw him when I was about six months old. My mother, R. Rajalakshmi, taught at Annamalai University in Chidambaram, and during the day, I was well cared for by aunts and grandparents in the usual way of an extended Indian family. When I was about a year and a half, my father left again, this time with my mother, to go to Ottawa on a National Research Council fellowship. They returned a little over a year later, and during their absence I was brought up by my grandmother and my aunt Gomathi, to whom I remain close to this day. When I was three, my parents moved to Baroda (now appropriately called by its Gujarati name of Vadodara, which refers to the abundance of banyan trees that the city used to have), where my father was appointed at an unusually young age to head a new department of biochemistry at the Maharaja Sayajirao (M.S.) University of Baroda. When he started the department, there was just some empty lab space with no equipment or people. He managed to acquire a lowspeed table-top centrifuge, and would get blocks of ice from a nearby ice factory, crush them, and place them around the centrifuge so that his samples would remain cold during enzyme purification. With this setup he managed to publish two papers in Nature in quick succession. Within a few years, the department was well established in both teaching and research, and equipped with instruments, a cold room and an animal house. Unusually for an Indian man of his generation, my father, being aware of my mother s intellectual abilities, encouraged her to go abroad by herself to obtain a Ph.D. She obtained a fellowship at McGill University to do a Ph.D. in psychology, where one of her mentors was the famous psychologist Donald Hebb, whose theories presaged modern ideas about synaptic plasticity as a basis for memory and behavior. Probably because she felt guilty about leaving my father and me behind, she finished her Ph.D. in under 18 months, which must be something of a record. When she returned, she could not find a suitable position in the Psychology Department in Baroda. Instead she used her analytical skills to help my father in his research, working initially as a CSIR pool officer, which was a temporary scheme by the Government of India to support scientists returning from abroad. This was the beginning of a lifelong collaboration in their work. My childhood and adolescence were filled with visiting scientists from both India and abroad, many of whom would stay with us. A life of science struck me as being both interesting and particularly international in its character. My move to Baroda was something of a culture shock initially because until the age of three I only spoke Tamil, a language that I unfortunately no longer speak well. One of my earliest memories is of standing in a playground not being able to understand a word of the Gujarati the children were speaking. This feeling of being an outsider has remained with me for much of my life as my career has taken me to various countries. Because my parents did not speak Gujarati either, they enrolled me in what was then the only English language school in town, the Convent of Jesus and Mary School, which was located next to a large military base. After kindergarten, my mother persuaded the school to let me skip a grade. Shortly after my sister Lalita was born in 1959, my family went to Adelaide, Australia in 1960–61 where I studied in fourth and part of fifth grades. I remember the year in Adelaide as one of the most carefree years of my childhood, and returned with an Australian accent that my former schoolmates could hardly understand. Because of the six month difference between the Australian and Indian school years, I effectively again skipped a grade on my return. The rest of my schooling was at the Convent School. By that time, there were other English schools in Baroda, and the nuns who ran the school decided to convert it to a girls school and no longer admit boys. They allowed those boys who had enrolled to stay on,