If you want to win a Nobel Prize ....

If you want to win a Nobel Prize, the probability for it increases depending upon the particular branch you choose for your research studies. The one little branch of science where more people won the Nobel Prize is X-ray Crystallography. The chemistry prize for this year has gone to three outstanding and very deserving crystallographers - Yonath, Steitz and Ramakrishnan. Also this is a field where many women work. Another woman Nobel laureate in this field has been Dorothy Hodgkin, not only a genius in the field but also a person who supported lots of crystallographers in developing countries. So many Indian scientists including my guru worked along with her. Two other deserving women (Rosalind Franklin and Isabella Karle) never got much recognition in their early years, because they were women. I was privileged to have either interacted professionally with many great crystallographers or listened to their talks in meetings in our lab here and elsewhere. I think many Indian women (like my friend Kalyani, retired Dy Director of NAL) with their accumulated knowledge on symmetry through the rangOlis will do very well in this field. Simply put, a material has to be crystallised (like salt or sugar), exposed to X-rays and the intensities of spots or reflections measured, a lot of computations done to get the electron density (it is the electrons in the atom that scatter the X-rays giving rise to the dot-like spots) and an atomic model obtained. After obtaining the atomic model the function of the enzyme or ribosome must be carefully studied. This will lead to the development of drugs as in the case of AIDS therapeutics for which the starting point was a structure solved in our lab. This year's award is a triumph for the human spirit as epitomised by Ada Yonath who crystallised it more than twenty-five years ago when nobody dared to utter the words ribosome and crystal at the same time! I am so happy for Venky (the youngest of the lot) too as he is such a nice person.

Here is a picture that shows simply what X-ray crystallography does and also a cartoon of the ribosome structure that contains both RNAs (larger helices - blue and grey) and proteins (smaller helices - purple and dark violet).

Regards! - J K Mohana Rao