Professor Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan’s influence now extends well beyond the world of science. That much was obvious when he addressed a lay audience at the FT Weekend Festival of ideas in Kenwood House Gardens in north London in September this year.
He was loudly cheered, for example – and not just by young people – when he argued it was the duty of scientists such as himself to speak up for a more progressive and liberal Britain that was open to influences from around the world.
Afterwards, there were quite a few takers when “Venki”, as he is popularly known, signed copies of his book, Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome, which was published last year. Its promotion has taken him to numerous literature festivals in Britain and overseas, notably the Jaipur Literary Festival in January this year when he delivered the keynote address.
At the FT Festival, he discussed “the future of science” with Clive Cookson, science editor of the Financial Times, who introduced the 2009 Nobel Laureate for chemistry as “Britain’s senior scientist – he is our senior scientist because he is president of the Royal Society”.
Venki was described aptly as “a true citizen scientist of the world”.
Normally a mild manner man, Venki explained why, exceptionally, he had taken offence at remarks made by the former Prime Minister Theresa May who had told a gathering where he was present: “ ‘You know, if you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t even know what citizenship means.’ ”
Venki spoke of his feelings on hearing those words: “Here I was, an India- born (scientist) from America, volunteering my services free of charge to be president of the Royal Society as a service to British science, so I really took that rather personally.”
The audience packed in the FT tent erupted as Venki said: “I like to think of myself now as a citizen of nowhere.”
Cookson asked Venki, who has been based at the Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge since 1999, having moved to the UK from America, whether he would now stay put in this country after Brexit.
Again there was sustained applause as Venki clearly touched a chord by pledging: “Those who have a certain view of the world shouldn’t abandon our problems. The US has its own problems with (Donald) Trump although that has an expiration date whereas what Britain is doing could be very, very long lasting. It could be generations and possibly irreversible. Those of us who believe in a certain view of the world need to stay and actually make the case for our view of the world.”
Venki, himself the son of two science professors, was born in Tamilnadu in 1952 and moved at the age of 19 to the United States after doing his first degree at Baroda University in Gujarat. He came to Cambridge to continue his research after spells at Ohio University, University of California in San Diego, Yale University and the University of Utah.
Venki, who now has dual US and UK nationality, was knighted in 2012 for “services to molecular biology”.
The big change in his career was switching from physics to biology and ultimately conducting research into ribosomes, which “translate the DNA genetic code into life” – according to his Nobel citation.
Venki, who has an understated sense of humour, provoked laughter by telling his FT audience: “To the public, Nobel Prize winners are sages who can pontificate about different areas but I have to say the prize is given for a discovery or an invention – it is not even given for being a smart scientist or even a good one. I know some Nobel Laureates who are not even that good a scientist.”
He held his audience as he sounded a warning about the dangers of tampering with genetic material in human beings. His great gift is being able to explain complex scientific ideas in simple language which most people can understand.
“It might be a bit arrogant to start tinkering with genes – playing around with DNA,” he said. “You can also modify humans for the future and in that way you are now becoming part of the evolution – you are now directing evolution rather than letting it occur naturally. And that is extremely controversial because we don’t know enough about why it is that we have this combination of genes.”
He emphasised: “What we think of as a bad gene might in future actually protect us against some environmental change. So it would be a bit arrogant except in very obvious cases like cystic fibrosis to start tinkering with genes.”
In his opinion, “we need a society that is very, very careful about how these technologies are used. Right now the technology isn’t quite proven to be safe but it could soon happen – lots of people are working on it – so it will at some point pass the threshold of safety. When that happens there will be enormous pressure from people to say, ‘Look why do I risk passing this disease on to my offspring? Why don’t we eliminate this defect from all of us?’ That’s what I call the thin end of the edge.”
There might come a time when people would demand, “ ‘I want to be a bit stronger or taller, I want blonde hair or blue eyes… if I live in Britain I’d like a fairer skin’. You could start seeing this invidious creep about what you might want to use it for.”
He cited the recent case of a Chinese scientist who broke an agreed international understanding by modifying the genes of twin sisters so that they would be immune to AIDS.
Although this development might at first sound attractive, the reaction of the international communities and even the authorities in China was one of shock.
“This was a stupid thing – you don’t know what the risks are from having this mutation in the receptor,” said Venki. “You don’t know what else has been done to these children’s genome in the process. I don’t know what has happened to this Chinese scientist – he has disappeared.”
Venki, who has been to China three times, is due to pay another visit because a Chinese translation of his book is due to be released soon.
The last 12 months have been exceptionally busy for him. As president since 2015 of the Royal Society, the first Indian to hold the post since it was founded nearly 360 years ago in 1660 , Venki has fought hard to minimise the damage that withdrawal from the European Union might do to British science.
In a letter to the Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Venki argued: “A no-deal Brexit would be bad for UK science. It would discourage recruitment of international talent, shut us out of valuable scientific collaborations, and restrict access to new medicines and technologies that benefit everyone living in the UK. UK science thrives on the ideas, knowledge and creativity of talented people. One in six academic staff in UK higher educational institutions is from other EU countries and they can easily choose to build their careers elsewhere. A no-deal Brexit will make the UK much less attractive.”
He added: “Science is increasingly an internationally collaborative endeavour and the UK’s collaboration rates are increasing fastest with our European neighbours. New research commissioned by the Royal Society shows that more than a third of UK research papers are co-authored with the EU – compared with 17.6 per cent with the USA.”
In July, he advanced similar arguments when presiding over the ceremony in which 62 new Fellows and foreign members, half a dozen of them of Indian origin, were admitted to the Royal Society.
He promised the society would always strive to maintain and strengthen its international relations. “We do that because science and scientists transcend national boundaries and work in a common cause for the advancement of human knowledge.”
It is known that Venki had little patience for the claims made by some Indian politicians who say that the country boasted transplant surgery and flying machines even in mythological times.
But he couched his reservations in the language of intelligent discourse: “The Royal Society was an early advocate of what is now known as the scientific method. Its motto – Nullius in verba or roughly on nobody’s word – is the philosophy that new knowledge is acquired by observation and experiment, that is, it is evidence based.
“In doing so the Royal Society helped win one of the major debates in science in its time and influence the subsequent course of science.”
He does not personally choose the new Fellows but under his leadership there has been an effort to correct the ethnic and also the gender imbalance by bringing in more women, whose proportion currently stands at 25 per cent – “which is about the same as the proportion of women with the rank of full professor or equivalent which is really where our candidate pool is from”.
As president, he has enjoyed meeting people he would not normally encounter.
“I have had experiences that I would never have had if I had not taken this job. At the Royal Society you almost by default meet lots and lots of different scientists but you also meet people from different walks of life,” he said. “You meet people from government, politicians, you meet business people, people from the humanities, the arts, writers.”
At the Science Museum, which hosts lunches bringing together people from disparate worlds, “you meet all sorts of people: Jeremy Irons and Margaret Drabble and people like that. These are not people I would normally meet working at the LMB (Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge). I would say this cross-talk across a broad spectrum of people has been a tremendously valuable experience.”
Venki has also campaigned for something that might take years to achieve – a broadening of the school curriculum so that children continue to study the core subjects which underpin science – mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology – along with the arts right through school and possibly even into university. He reckons his time as president will have been worthwhile if he can persuade the government to commission a serious review into the future of education.
At a symposium convened by the British Academy, he spoke of the gap between students who take science and others who focus solely on the arts, a problem highlighted as far back as 1959 by the scientist-cum-novelist C P Snow in a landmark lecture, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.
In autumn last year, his eclectic taste in music was apparent when he was a guest on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4, where his choices included Carnatic music, “the classical music of South India”; Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Chap tilak sab cheen li; and the score from the James Ivory/Ismail Merchant film A Room with a View based on E M Forster’s novel. Instead of the Bible, he asked to take the Mahabharata, “the huge epic of which one chapter alone is the Bhagavad Gita which is one of Hinduism’s more important works and shows humans with all their foibles and their moral dilemmas and complexity. Nothing is black and white.”
As for the future, he is thinking of doing another book. He has been encouraged by the success of Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome, which was due to come out in paperback in the autumn of 2019.
“The book is not flying off the shelves like Michelle Obama’s book but it is doing well for a science book.”
He remarked: “I enjoyed doing this – this is a memoir and in a way it pretty much wrote itself because it had a clear narrative, even though it took a lot of time to do all the ground work and interview various people.
“I am thinking vaguely of a book that explores the biology of ageing and death and why it is inevitable, and why (there is) this desire for immortality. And I am also a little dubious about this research to find immortality – first of all, I am not even sure that it would be good for society. But leaving that aside the science is hyped up far more than it ought to be.”
Venki will step down by December next year after five years as president of the Royal Society. He said it had been “an enormous privilege” being “a spokesperson for British science and representing science”.
His name is already inscribed on the presidential board at the society’s headquarters in Carlton House Terrace. Those 60 names – among them Christopher Wren, Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton, Humphry Davy and Ernest Rutherford – have a sort of immortality.
