Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

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.

Scientists are not movie stars or politicians who will feel insulted if they are not showered with accolades. Scientists are not interested in accolades.

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 earlier exposure to physics certainly helped me in the use of biophysical techniques like crystallography, the use of computing, calculations, etc.

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.

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.

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.

There's a perception out there that the U.K. has become unfriendly to immigrants. Even if that isn't true, the very fact that that is the perception will make people not even want to come.

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.

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.

Like the women in my family, I've found the women in my lab a hard-nosed, ambitious lot who have gone on to be faculty members at top universities. In my own family, it is my father who is prone to bursting into tears.

Governments and scientists in India need to ensure that politics and religious ideology do not intrude into science. They belong to separate spheres, and if they are not kept separate, it is science in India and the country as a whole that will suffer.