Mysuru: Mysuru Literary Forum Charitable Trust and Mysuru Book Clubs 2015 are hosting Venki Ramakrishnan, a Nobel Laureate, at Vijnana Bhavan, Manasagangothri, Mysuru, on Jan. 8 at 6 pm.

Venki Ramakrishnan will speak about his recent book ‘Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and Longevity.’  This book has bagged the Atta Galatta Literary Award for the non-fiction category at  the Bengaluru Literature Festival 2024.

Prof. C. Naganna and Dr. Mewa Singh will be in conversation with the Nobel Laureate. For details, contact Founder-Chairperson Shubha Sanjay Urs on Mob: 99802-50114.

Profile: Venki Ramakrishnan was born and grew up in India where he obtained a degree in Physics. At the age of 19, he left for the United States to pursue a Ph.D in Physics, but his interests soon turned to Biology.

He spent almost three decades in the USA before moving to England in 1999 to work in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge where he is now a Group Leader.

Most of his work has been on central problems in Molecular Biology, including how genetic information in our DNA is “read” to make the proteins they specify.

He and others determined the precise atomic structure of the ribosome which helped us to understand how it worked. The work also showed how many antibiotics work by blocking bacterial ribosomes, which could help us to design better antibiotics. For this work, he shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

From 2015-2020, Venki Ramakrishnan was President of the Royal Society, one of the oldest scientific organisations in the world. Venki Ramakrishnan is the author of two books. The first, ‘Gene Machine’ (2018), a popular memoir about the quest for the structure of ribosome. His most recent book, ‘Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality’ (2024) is about the biology of aging and death.