A Nobel week in New Delhi

The festive season has begun on a brilliant note with Dr Venki Ramakrishnan and Sir Paul Nurse, both UK based Nobel Laureates visiting Delhi last week.

Dr Ramakrishnan delivered his public lecture on ‘Antibiotics and the Cell’s Protein Factory’ on Monday in AIIMS had a spell bound audience. The account of his lab’s work on unravelling the molecular structure of ribosome and its complexes with several antibiotics was very well received. This was evident in the animated Q&A session following his lecture. I understand his insight could help in the fight against antibiotic resistance, a worldwide problem which is on the increase. His and colleagues’ work on imaging the molecular interaction between ribosomes and antibiotics has provided key data to help guide structure based drug design of new antibiotics to tackle drug resistant bacteria. 

Dr Ramakrishnan will be in India between December and January and will be delivering lectures in Bangalore, Pune and Mumbai as well.  He delivered his lecture in Hyderabad last week as well. Dr Ramakrishnan gave an interview to Rajya Sabha TV which covered his research work.

Sir Paul Nurse gave the Blackett Memorial lecture, ‘Controlling the Cell Cycle’, an exchange lecture between the Royal Society, UK and Indian National Science Academy also in the last week. He enthralled a packed audience in JNU with his description of how he and colleagues went about discovering the key regulators of the cell cycle and how cell shape and cell dimensions are determined. Sir Paul certainly came across as an excellent science communicator with the way he used metaphors in explaining complex concepts as well as his unerring ability to get the listeners visualize these concepts as later commented by an attendee.

His pioneering work has presented a basic blueprint showing the researchers how cells reproduced and laid the foundations for much of their understanding of how the cell cycle is regulated in both normal cells, and in diseases such as cancer where the cell cycle is no longer controlled properly. Sir Paul led Cancer Research UK as its first Chief Executive and was knighted in 1999 for services to cancer research.

Sir Paul is presently director of the the Francis Crick Institute which has been set up in partnership between Cancer Research UK, Imperial College London, King’s College London, the Medical Research Council, University College London (UCL) and the Wellcome Trust with an aim to create a world leading biomedical research centre. The Institute’s new name has been chosen in honour of one of the UK’s greatest scientists.  In fact both Francis Crick and Dr Ramakrishnan belong to the same laboratory, LMB (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology). Dr Venki is the 14^th Nobel Laureate from this laboratory! Both Sir Paul and Dr Ramakrishnan very well represent UK’s vibrant research ecosystem whose research work has opened up long term possibilities in cancer treatment and dealing with antibiotic resistance.

The Science and Innovation team closely worked along with the organisers from Indian National Science Academy as well as AIIMS and JNU to ensure both these lectures were a great success. The huge and enthused response to their lectures was indicative of how the impact of research work of both these Nobel Laureates has struck a chord with the research community in India.