I knew the ribosome was going to be the focus of Nobel prizes. It stands at the crossroads of biology, between the gene and what comes out of the gene. But I had convinced myself I was not going to be a winner.
We are all human beings, and our nationality is simply an accident of birth.
I think we are intrinsically prone to being irrational and superstitious. A lot of it comes from our fear of the unknown and the fear of a lack of control over our fate.
Science is an international enterprise where discoveries in one part of the world are useful in other parts.
There is no magical formula for winning a Nobel Prize.
Science is curiosity, testing and experimenting.
I was born in 1952 in Chidambaram, an ancient temple town in Tamil Nadu best known for its temple of Nataraja, the lord of dance.
Nobody has approached me about an offer to work in India. However, I can categorically state that if they did so, I would refuse immediately.
My mother, R. Rajalakshmi, taught at Annamalai University in Chidambaram, and during the day, I was well cared for by aunts and grandparents in the usual way of an extended Indian family.
I am still the same person doing the same science. Why are people so impressed when some academy in Sweden gives an award?
I had an excellent math and physics teacher in high school named T.C. Patel, and in the university, I had truly dedicated professors in both physics and mathematics who gave me a sound foundation with which to pursue graduate studies.
I remember reading a 'Scientific American' article about the use of new physical techniques - including neutron scattering - as a method for unravelling the structure of the ribosome. I was fascinated.
It takes a certain amount of courage to tackle very hard problems in science, I now realise. You don't know what the timescale of your work will be: decades or only a few years.
Science today is a highly collaborative exercise, and to convert it into a contest, as the Nobel does, is a bad way to look at science.
Unusually for an Indian man of his generation, my father, being aware of my mother's intellectual abilities, encouraged her to go abroad by herself to obtain a Ph.D.
My childhood and adolescence were filled with visiting scientists from both India and abroad, many of whom would stay with us. A life of science struck me as being both interesting and particularly international in its character.
During the decade following the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, the problem of translation - namely, how genetic information is used to synthesize proteins - was a central topic in molecular biology.
I began studying ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Moore's laboratory in 1978.
The success in the determination of the high-resolution structures of ribosomal subunits and eventually the whole ribosome was the culmination of decades of effort.
I am very grateful for the dedicated work and intellectual contributions of generations of talented postdocs, students and research assistants without whom none of the work from my laboratory would have been possible.
