Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

Royal Swedishs Academy of Sciences has given the following as press release in their website http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2009/press.html
"The Royal Swedish Adademy of Scienceshas decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 jointly to
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge,United Kingdom
Thomas A. Steitz, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA
Ada E. Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
"for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome"

The Ribosome translates the DNA code into life
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 awards studies of one of life's core processes: the ribosome's translation of DNA information into life. Ribosomes produce proteins, which in turn control the chemistry in all living organisms. As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics.
This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.
Inside every cell in all organisms, there are DNA molecules. They contain the blueprints for how a human being, a plant or a bacterium, looks and functions. But the DNA molecule is passive. If there was nothing else, there would be no life.
The blueprints become transformed into living matter through the work of ribosomes. Based upon the information in DNA, ribosomes make proteins: oxygen-transporting haemoglobin, antibodies of the immune system, hormones such as insulin, the collagen of the skin, or enzymes that break down sugar. There are tens of thousands of proteins in the body and they all have different forms and functions. They build and control life at the chemical level.
An understanding of the ribosome's innermost workings is important for a scientific understanding of life. This knowledge can be put to a practical and immediate use; many of today's antibiotics cure various diseases by blocking the function of bacterial ribosomes. Without functional ribosomes, bacteria cannot survive. This is why ribosomes are such an important target for new antibiotics.
This year's three Laureates have all generated 3D models that show how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome. These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity's suffering."

What Dr. Ramakrishnan says about the reason why he changed his area of work: “Well, I’ll be honest with you. I was a theoretical physicist but my PhD work was on a problem that was not particularly interesting to me at the time. And I used to subscribe to Scientific American and found that there were all these wonderful discoveries happening in biology…. So, I decided to switch.” Besides his parents were peer biochemist. His parents were engaged in research in the West. In 1955, when the University of Baroda invited his father C.V. Ramakrishnan to join the MS University, Baroda in Gujarat, the couple gave up their career in north America and returned home. Together, C.V. Ramakrishnan and Rajalakshmi set up the biochemistry faculty at the University , and won global recognition for their work on the role of nutrition in brain development. Their young son was then specialising in physics and had already done his BSc. from the University of Baroda and his PhD. later from Ohio University, both in physics.
Then he joined Yale as a post-doctoral fellow in the chemistry department.