Venki Ramakrishnan is a Nobel Laureate and a former president of the Royal Society. A molecular biologist, he grew up in India, went to the United States aged 19, and then moved in 1999 to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. He is famed for his work on the synthesis of proteins by the ribosome, for which he shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Ramakrishnan is the author of two best selling books - Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher The Secrets Of The Ribosome, and Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality.