Physicist swipes Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Institute of Physics News

7 October 2009

Institute of Physics News

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s Nobel Prize for Physics, a UK-based physicist has also been honoured today but this time with the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a senior research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, is one of three winners for using x-ray crystallography, a physics-based technique which uses x-rays to determine atomic arrangements, to create a model of the DNA ribosome structure, furthering our understanding of the chemical processes that create life.

Ramakrishnan won a third of the prize along with Thomas A. Steitz from Yale University and Ada E. Yonath from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Philip Diamond, Associate Director at the Institute of Physics in the UK, said, “The honour bestowed upon Ramakrishnan today is testament to the foundational and inter-disciplinary nature of physics. Discoveries of the past few centuries have invariably been grounded in technological advances made possible through physics research – from understanding DNA and medical imaging, to modelling climate change or understanding the first few seconds after the Big Bang, physics is the underpinning discipline.”

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