Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, Nov 12: India-born Nobel laureate Professor Venki Ramakrishnan has been awarded the Order of Merit by Britain’s King Charles III for his distinguished service to science.
“His Majesty The King has been pleased to make six new appointments to the Order of Merit. Appointments to the Order are made in recognition of distinguished service to the armed forces, science, art, literature, or for the promotion of culture,” Buckingham Palace said on Friday evening.
“The individuals were chosen by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in early September,” it said.
The 70-year-old molecular biologist, who lives in the UK, is among six appointments made to the order by the late Queen Elizabeth II before her death in September and the first to be appointed by King Charles.
Professor Venki, who was born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, studied biology in the US before relocating to the UK, where he currently serves as the Group Leader of Cambridge University’s MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, one of the world’s top scientific centres.
For his research on ribosomal structure, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, and the Queen knighted him in 2012. From November 2015 until November 2020, he served as the Royal Society of the United Kingdom’s president.
He has been using electron microscopy more recently to observe ribosome activity in higher organisms. This research has improved our understanding of the ribosome’s function and how antibiotics affect it.
He has previously studied on chromatin and histone structure, which aids in understanding how DNA is arranged in cells.
The British monarch only bestows the Order of Merit as a distinctive honorific. King Edward VII established the Order of Merit in 1902, and it is given to people who have distinguished themselves in the military, the sciences, the arts, and literature, or for advancing culture, depending on the monarch’s personal preferences.
It is restricted to 24 members at any given time and the other new recipients this week include: broadcaster Baroness Floella Benjamin, architect Sir David Adjaye, nursing expert Dame Elizabeth Anionwu, University of Oxford professor Margaret MacMillan and geneticist and biologist Sir Paul Nurse are the other recipients of the honour.
The renowned British conservationist Sir David Attenborough, the artist David Hockney, the former Speaker of the House of Commons Betty Boothroyd, and the computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee who created the World Wide Web are among members of the Order.
