World-renowned chemist and Nobel Prize-winner Venkatraman Ramakrishnan had never seen anything like it. Watching incoming storms drape the Salt Lake Valley from the porch of his 11th Avenue home was something the scientist could never discover under a microscope, but that and Utah's vast landscapes made his four years in Salt Lake City some of his favorite.
The view was "spectacular" to the native of India, who would eventually dissect the human genome, solve both the atomic and genetic structure of the ribosome, and win this year's prestigious Nobel Prize. The work, he said, isn't terribly surprising, but "the surprising thing for me is that I was able to be part of it."
However, University of Utah professor and chairman of biochemistry Wesley Sundquist, who met Ramakrishnan before they both ended up in Utah, said he wasn't all that surprised, but thrilled for his friend who "elucidated much more nature than most scientists do."
"It was simply amazing to watch the rate at which he learned," Sundquist said.
Ramakrishnan was in Salt Lake City on Wednesday to deliver two lectures on science, including the evening Benning Society Special Lecture in Medicine, in which he explained the structure and function of the ribosome, how the ribosome structure helps to understand the mechanisms of existing antibiotics and developing new ones, and the role the U. played in his research.
"My wife and I still miss it," he said. "I think if it hadn't been for my feeling that this is a very hard problem and I had no idea how long it would take to actually solve it, we wouldn't have left."
"Venki," as he is called by his friends and family, began his research on ribosomes while he was teaching at the U. in 1999. He completed the work at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, which has more stable funding for research and a long track record of supporting "this kind of difficult structural project," Ramakrishnan said.
But the critical start, including the acquisition of "good crystals" necessary for his research, began at the U., where he said he enjoyed working with "very, very smart and enthusiastic" colleagues.
"I wanted to pay my respects to the place because that's where it all started," he said.
His work, along with that of two other scientists who will share the prize with Ramakrishnan, focuses on protein-making ribosomes, which he said "are the fundamental molecules in the cell."
Proteins, he said, help eyes to detect light, put oxygen into blood, develop antibodies to protect against infection, digest food and are the primary element of skin. "They do nearly all the functions of our lives," he said.
In the process of determining the structure, which eventually led to winning the prize, Ramakrishnan said there were times of frustration when he would become "very depressed." He was in a three-way race with other scientist groups to discover the atomic structure.
As "competitors, not collaborators," he said, they all ended up completing work that will help develop antibiotics that might fight resistant strains of bacteria often called "super bugs."
"It leads to an understanding of a fundamental process in biology — that's probably the most important thing — which is how information in genes gets used to make proteins," Ramakrishnan said. "That's absolutely fundamental to all life."
New antibiotic compounds, designed with his Nobel Prize-winning methods, are already in clinical trials, "and it's looking quite hopeful," he said.
Winning the award has changed his life, although he hopes it is only temporary so he can get back to the work he loves in the lab.
"There is lots of work to still be understood," he said. "I expect that to take well beyond my scientific career."
e-mail: wleonard@desnews.com