Who is Venkatraman Ramakrishnan? The scientist who could not make it to IITs but won the Nobel Prize and Padma Vibhushan

Every year, lakhs of Indian students pin their futures on JEE results, hearts pounding over ranks that feel like make-or-break verdicts.

The pressure's real, with coaching marathons, sleepless nights, and dreams of IIT glory. But what if that score isn't the finish line?

It's about trusting your gut when "failure" hits, pushing some people to pivot, work even harder, and discover paths and areas of interest, more unusual than imagined.
One such shining example is a scientist who could not get selected into an IIT but won a Nobel prize.

Who is Venkatraman Ramakrishnan?

Venkatraman "Venki" Ramakrishnan, born in 1952 in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, is a British-American biologist who cracked the ribosome's atomic structure, earning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry shared with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath.

Raised in a family with a science background—his parents were professors, his dad heading Biochemistry at Baroda—he tried for IITs and Christian Medical College (CMC) Vellore but didn't clear either entrance, according to an Economic Times report.
Instead, he earned a Physics BSc at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda under a National Science Talent Search Scholarship, crediting it for sparking his curiosity, as per the university site.

He earned international fame after several failures

Post his graduation, Ramakrishnan headed to the US, switching to Biology. He faced several hurdles after being rejected by 50 job applications early on, but landed at Yale, Brookhaven National Lab, and later the UK’s MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he mapped ribosomes, the cell's protein factories.

His ribosome work, solving a decades-old riddle, appeared in Nature, Science, and Cell, revolutionising biology, as noted by Baroda University.


In 2009, the Nobel committee honored him "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". He served as the Royal Society President (2015-2020) and got India's Padma Vibhushan in 2010.

Lessons for JEE Dreamers

Ramakrishnan's no-coaching backstory stings for today's toppers. During a 2010 IISc lecture, he revealed failing the IIT/CMC tests. But IIT didn't dim his drive; he persisted through post-doc rejections.


Today, at 73, Venki is inspired by Cambridge, authoring books like Gene Machine.