Venki Ramakrishnan

Impact

Venki Ramakrishnan is a structural biologist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for determining the structure of the ribosome; his group solved the first high-resolution structure of the bacterial 30S ribosomal subunit in 2000 and later used cryo-electron microscopy to study eukaryotic and mitochondrial translation initiation. He served as President of the Royal Society from 2015 to 2020. For the longevity field his relevance is chiefly as a communicator: his 2024 book Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality surveys the biology of ageing and death, including caloric restriction, young-blood experiments, cryonics and long-lived species, and examines the scientific and social questions raised by efforts to extend lifespan. The book was shortlisted for the 2024 Royal Society Science Book Prize. He previously wrote Gene Machine (2018), a memoir of the race to solve the ribosome structure. His research group now also studies translation from circular RNAs, including their use in RNA therapeutics.

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Research output

345 works · 32,151 citations · h-index 87 OpenAlex ↗

Selected publications

• Structure of the 30S ribosomal subunit ↗ 2000 · 2,043 citations
• Functional insights from the structure of the 30S ribosomal subunit and its interactions with antibiotics ↗ 2000 · 1,619 citations
• Structure of the 70 S Ribosome Complexed with mRNA and tRNA ↗ 2006 · 1,312 citations
• Recognition of Cognate Transfer RNA by the 30 S Ribosomal Subunit ↗ 2001 · 1,174 citations
• Ribosome Structure and the Mechanism of Translation ↗ 2002 · 957 citations

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