A Nobel for the attitude

I’ve got friends in universities in the US and Europe who are lucky enough to have a Nobel Laureate take the lecture from 11 to 1 on Tuesday mornings and another Nobel Laureate take another class from 3 to 5 on Thursday evenings. While that’s not the case in our IITs and even in IISc where I currently work now, we do have the occasional celebrity from the science community come in every once in a while to lift our heads above the water.

Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year for his work on the ribosomes structure at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.On Tuesday, 5th January 2010, he spoke at the IISc Centenary Lecture at the J. N. Tata auditorium at IISc, Bangalore. The talk was titled "From Baroda to Cambridge: A life in science." Click here to read the story from the press.

There’s no dearth of role models for students in science. Text books are awash with Linus Paulings and Neils Bohrs. As Dr.Venki (as he likes to be called) himself pointed out earlier in the week on a show on NDTV, the nature of science is universal. Intellectual property can flow (and usually does) with relative ease as the matters of the mind cannot be contained by judicial laws. This very nature of science has meant that scientist role models are not in shortfall, and that their country of origin is almost seemingly inconsequential. The DNA doesn’t care if the discoverer was Irish or Japanese.  

The first half of Dr. Venki’s talk was an autobiographical one. He had slides on the screen, and in talking about his journey through school and college in Baroda, he frequently had pictures of his teachers and made references as to how each one played a role in impacting him. He was heavy in challenging the premise of performing ‘a pedestrian PhD thesis’ and in doing 2^nd and 3^rd grade research that are marginal increments of existing knowledge. However, he did add that making fundamental breakthroughs in Physics at this stage was definitely very unlikely. 

The second half of the talk encompassed decoding the ribosome structure at the MRC Laboratory in Cambridge. As one of the 14 Nobel Laureates in his department, the unsaid rule among researchers there is  that if one cannot answer the question “Why are you doing (researching) what you’re doing?” you probably shouldn’t be there at the first place. “We are not in the business of generating information and data. We are in the business of understanding and advancing our knowledge”, he said.

I’m not sure if I understood the part about the ribosomes, but I sure learnt that a constancy of purpose is very important in one’s career, and that even a Nobel Laureate gives credit to those who have gone out before him and created that pool of knowledge for the rest to work on.  

For Dr. Venki’s Nobel Lecture, check here.