Prof CV Ramakrishnan, Founder of MSU’s Department of Biochemistry, dies in UK at 98

Prof Rajalakshmi, who passed away in 2007, did her PhD in Psychology at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and was the Professor of Biochemistry and Nutrition in the Biochemistry Department that her husband had founded. She played a significant role in mentoring, teaching and research in food and nutrition at the MS University, which was the first in the country to start a Home Science Faculty.

Prof Venki Ramakrishnan told The Indian Express on Saturday that his father would have turned 99 in January. “Apart from his impact on education in India, his own children did unusually well in academics and I am sure the reason is that he and my mother created an environment where education was valued,” said Prof Venki in an email.

Prof Ramakrishnan was born in Coimbatore and grew up in Kancheepuram in Tamil Nadu, before they moved to Vadodara in Gujarat with his family in 1955, where the family settled and Venki later went to the Convent of Jesus & Mary School and the MS University.

Prof Ramakrishnan did his post-doctoral fellowship from Madison, Wisconsin, in the United States in 1952, when he was still in Chidambaram. He would regularly visit India till 2019. Dr Vikram Sarabhai Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology, established in 2012 at MSU, was under his mentorship after Prof Venki, a British-American, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009. In December 2010, he visited Vadodara with Venki, spending time at the school and at MSU, where felicitation events were held for them.

Professor Comaralingam V Ramakrishnan, 98(left) is the father of Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan (right). (Image: File oyalsociety.org)

During his visit to Vadodara in 2019, which would be his last, he interacted with MSU students, and in 2021, he participated in a webinar co-hosted by the university to celebrate his 96th birthday. The virtual celebration was organised by one of his students, Professor RK Rao, from the Department of Physiology, University of Tennessee. Known for his sense of humour, Prof Ramakrishnan is heard telling a student from the batch of 1980 at the webinar — “You have become much older than me, so I am not able to identify you”.

Members of the Faculty of Science of MS University remember Prof CVR as “generous, kind and ever ready” to help the department as well as students seeking internships in the US.

Professor Hari Kataria, Dean of Faculty of Science, MSU, told The Indian Express, “Even after his retirement, he frequently visited the faculty. He was generous, kind and ready to help the department. He was instrumental in at least three students getting internships in the US as he was renowned in his own right and also because he was Venki’s father… He even used his personal relations to help students seeking internships and remained a guiding force for us.”

Professor Sarita Gupta, who is now an advisor to the Cell and Molecular Biology (CMB) Department, recalls her “good fortune” of having been mentored by Ramakrishnan.

“I worked extensively with him from 2009 to 2019, especially when he was guiding us to set up the CMB department, which is the only department in the country to offer an integrated course with BSc and MSc. In fact, he had retired in 1986 when I had just joined the University. His mentorship taught me a lot… He was a very good mentor but a tough master and it was not easy to work with him,” Gupta says.

She adds that she last received an email from Ramakrishnan on Teachers’ Day in response to her wishes.

“He used to say I am his adopted daughter… I have fond memories of him. As the founder of the Biochemistry Department and also CMB, he had an immense contribution to the university. His personality inspired many students and we have held several interactions for students, which they have thoroughly enjoyed. It was in 2019, when he last visited the University and department that we had honoured him with a Lifetime Felicitation for his dedicated contribution to the department and the university.”

MSU officials said that with the Diwali vacation on until November 17, a memorial service will be planned to pay tribute to Ramakrishnan once the session resumes.

Even after retirement, he lived a very active life and contributed to academics, including starting a programme for medical assistants in Chennai. The scientist couple donated all their life’s savings to the Sri Ramakrishna Mission Vidyalaya to support the college education of poor young students for five years, which he called the ‘Coimbatore Project’.

In his recent book ‘Why We Die’, Prof Venki writes, “…my father, at ninety-seven, still does his own grocery shopping, and cooking – making complicated Indian recipes and his own ice cream from scratch”.

A biographical note on Venki on the Nobel Prize site highlights how Prof Ramakrishnan started the Biochemistry department at MSU. “When he started the department, there was just some empty lab space with no equipment or people. He managed to acquire a low-speed table-top centrifuge, and would get blocks of ice from a nearby ice factory, crush them, and place them around the centrifuge so that his samples would remain cold during enzyme purification. With this setup he managed to publish two papers in Nature in quick succession. Within a few years, the department was well established in both teaching and research, and equipped with instruments, a cold room and an animal house”, it says.

Prof Ramakrishnan and his wife Rajalakshmi moved to the United States to live with their daughter Lalita Ramakrishnan in the 1980s, first in Palo Alto, before moving to Seattle in 2001. In 2014 Prof Ramakrishnan moved to Cambridge, UK to be with his daughter Lalita herself is a celebrated scientist and winner of the prestigious Koch Prize for her work on tuberculosis.