From physics to biosciences to Nobel

In the Gene Machine, we learn about the personalities of other great scientists and get an inkling of how the world of academic research works with all its complex rivalries, and collaborations

Gene Machine 

The race to decipher the secrets of the ribosome 

Venki Ramakrishnan 

Harper Collins

272 pages (including endnotes); Rs 699

This book is destined to become an enduring autobiographical classic. It's in the same league as James Watson's The Double Helix, or Cedric Villani's Birth of a Theorem. It offers a beautiful window into the life and thoughts of a great scientist. Along the way,  we learn about the personalities of other great scientists and get an inkling of how the world of academic research works with all its complex rivalries, and collaborations. 

We get a glimpse of the pressures that every serious academic researcher faces and the sense of urgency that develops when one research team knows that another is hot on its heels.  We also get some of the clearest, most lucid, non-technical explanations of very difficult scientific concepts, ranging through various subjects, that I have ever read.  

All of this comes leavened with large doses of quiet humour. The author writes in a self-deprecating style, which would let the unwary reader assume that all his achievements had been just a matter of luck. Through it all, a very interesting personality shines through. 

Venki Ramakrishnan can perhaps, be described as a buttoned-down maverick, somebody who is good at pretending to be conventional. The bare bones of his life story would be "bright, vegetarian Tamil Brahmin boy from overachieving family(both parents have PhDs, younger sister Lalitha is head of Immunology, Department of Medicine, Cambridge) goes on scholarship to the US, does brilliant research and ends up sharing a Nobel Prize".

But there are unusual breaks that show how he redefined his career trajectory and his life, multiple times, heading in directions no conventional person would have gone. Aged 19, Venkatraman “Venki” Ramakrishnan graduated in physics from Baroda University, which was not one of India's premier institutions in 1971. He did not sit for his GRE. But he was a national science talent scholar. The only US University willing to waive GRE requirements and give him financial aid was Ohio University — again, not Ivy League.  

Venki claims that while he was supposedly working on a PhD thesis in condensed matter (on ferroelectric phase transitions), he was actually learning Western classical music, playing chess and going hiking. He was also courting a single Jewish mom (well-known illustrator, Vera Rosenberry) with a four-year-old daughter. His courtship started in "comically inept" fashion because he did not realise she was interested in him and spent time playing with her daughter, while trying to set her up with a friend. Despite these rather large distractions, he completed his PhD at 23, doing what he claims was "barely acceptable" theoretical work. 

By then, he had realised he wasn't really interested in physics and had been seduced into studying it, by his admiration for Richard Feynman. He was, however, interested in biology and he knew nothing about it. As a 23-year-old physics PhD with a new wife and two kids (their infant son, Raman, who is now a well-known classical cellist), he switched disciplines at the very highest levels. 

He spent the next two years learning biology from the ground up at University of California, San Diego. He then applied to some 50 universities looking for a research position in biology, despite having a PhD in physics. Unsurprisingly, a series of rejections followed, before he got a position in Yale. From Yale, he moved to the Brookhaven Laboratory. From there,  he moved to the University of Utah and then he landed up at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. 

There was a connecting theme to all the peripatetic spinning around. He was interested in finding an establishment where he could pursue research into something both arcane and considered a potential  dead end. This was the ribosome, something he had not even heard of, until his days in San Diego.

For decades, the ribosome was the "elusive pimpernel" of the biosciences. The so-called "ribonucleoprotein particles of the microsomal fraction" had been discovered back in the 1950s, within a few years of the seminal discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA.  Bioscientist Howard Dintzis renamed it ribosome in the late 50s when it became obvious that this particle was important in making proteins. But it was a massive molecule, containing over a million atoms, and nobody could even begin to guess its structure. This meant that it was a black box with an opaque functionality.  Most bioscientists gave up even trying to figure it out and it became a sort of backwater. 

This is where the physics background came in handy. It is possible to use the technique of neutron scattering to map a molecule. But it requires a strong physics background to work through the experiments and sort out the data from noise. Of course, there were others working on the same lines. He ended up sharing the Nobel with Thomas Steitz, who had rejected his application for a research post, and with Ada Yonath, an Israeli crystallographer with whom he had a somewhat stormy relationship. There are sections of the book, which inspire the same sense of page-turning excitement as a thriller, though of course, we know the ending. Nevertheless, I don't want to give away too many spoilers. Just read it!