Venkatraman Ramakrishnan Science Quotations

Governments and scientists in India need to ensure that politics and religious ideology do not intrude into science. They belong to separate spheres, and if they are not kept separate, it is science in India and the country as a whole that will suffer.

You can only go into science because you're interested in it.

We live in an increasingly technological world where the issues are quite complex and based on some complicated science.

Science today is a highly collaborative exercise, and to convert it into a contest, as the Nobel does, is a bad way to look at science.

Science is an international enterprise where discoveries in one part of the world are useful in other parts.

People go into science out of curiosity, not to win awards. But scientists are human and have ambitions.

I think it is a mistake to judge science by Nobel Prizes.

I am still the same person doing the same science. Why are people so impressed when some academy in Sweden gives an award?

There is no room for political, personal or religious ideologies in science.

My childhood and adolescence were filled with visiting scientists from both India and abroad, many of whom would stay with us. A life of science struck me as being both interesting and particularly international in its character.

It's for scientists to lay out the data and lay out what they think, and then it's for the public to make up its own mind. We don't live in a priesthood where some small group imposes its views on other people - that's not the way that science works, and it's not the way a democratic society should work.

It takes a certain amount of courage to tackle very hard problems in science, I now realise. You don't know what the timescale of your work will be: decades or only a few years.