Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2009 — shared with Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath for mapping the atomic structure of the ribosome, the cellular machinery that builds every protein in every living thing. Born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, in 1952. Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda for the physics degree he started with, Ohio for the doctorate, then the wander into biology that defined the rest of his life — Yale, Brookhaven, Utah, and from 1999 the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where the ribosome work was completed. President of the Royal Society 2015–2020. His 2018 memoir Gene Machine is one of the most honest scientist's accounts of how an actual Nobel-Prize-winning research programme actually feels from inside, and it does not pretend the route was clean.