After Venkatraman Ramakrishnan learnt he’d shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (with Ada Yonath and Thomas Steitz), NatureNews went to meet him at the UK Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology, in Cambridge. Here he is, describing the thrill of seeing atomic-resolution structures of the ribosome – and his surprise at winning a chemistry Nobel: a subject in which, he admits, he’d flunk an undergraduate degree.

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