Top British science body head to lecture at SNU
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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge
By Yoon Sung-won
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, will deliver a special lecture at Seoul National University this week to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the Institute of Basic Science (IBS), the institute said Monday.
Ramakrishnan is also a renowned structural biologist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 alongside Tom Steitz and Ada Yonath for revealing the three-dimensional atomic map of a ribosome. This is the first time for the scientist to visit Korea.
“Holding a joint conference with the Royal Society, which is leading global basic science, and pushing for cooperation in research is an opportunity not to be lost for Korea’s basic scientific circle,” IBS President Kim Doo-chul said in a statement. “Taking Ramakrishnan’s first visit to Korea as an opportunity, we will strengthen exchange and collaboration with the Royal Society to take a key part in globalizing Korea’s basic science.”
Ramakrishnan will meet with Kim, Oct. 28, to discuss international cooperation between the Royal Society and the IBS in future science conferences. The two institutes signed a memorandum of understanding in London in 2013 and hosted joint conferences in Korea and Britain in 2014 and 2015, respectively.
The Royal Society president will deliver two lectures at a Seoul National University hall. At 10 a.m., he will talk about antibiotics and the cell’s protein factory in a public speech, and discuss the use of recent advances in cryoEM to study ribosome structure and function in a research seminar in the afternoon, the IBS said.
Born in 1952 in India, the scientist received a bachelor’s degree in physics at Baroda University in 1971 and obtained his doctoral degree also in physics at Ohio University in 1976. Afterwards, he worked as a senior biophysicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory between 1983 and 1995 and lectured at the University of Utah from 1995 to 1999.
Ramakrishnan was named president of Royal Society in 2015 and took office early this year.
The Royal Society was established in November 1660 and is Europe’s first science academy. Historic scientists and inventors such as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Michael Faraday, Robert Boyle, James Watt and Alexander Fleming were all members of the society. Currently, more than 1,600 scientists and engineers including Stephen Hawking are working on research and development projects sponsored by the society.