Experience of Winning the Nobel Prize
I wrote about Venki Ramakrishnan’s views on prizes in an earlier blog. But Ramakrishnan also knew he was one of the contenders for a Nobel for his work on the ribosome, whenever an award came to that field. Further, he also knew others might get the prize, not him. And so it was an emotional rollercoaster, as described in his book, Gene Machine:
“Every time I
learned the Nobel Prize was for something other than the ribosome, I felt
relieved because it was a postponement of the inevitable disappointment. What
was invidious was that even if you didn’t really care about the prize itself,
by plucking out no more than three from a cohort of people who had all done
important science, they made the rest feel like also-rans.”
The day
he finally got the call that he’d won the Nobel:
“Sometimes, I had
fantasized about refusing it (who wanted to go to Sweden in cold, dark December
to eat bad vegetarian food?). But the reality is that no matter how people may
feel about prizes in the abstract, it is very hard to actually turn them down,
especially something as grand as the Nobel Prize.”
Plus,
of course, “the cash is always welcome”. Besides:
“Even Richard
Feynman, who disdained awards, had accepted it.”
When
his wife, Vera, learned that he had won, her response?
“I thought you had
to be really smart to win one of those!”
Ramakrishnan
muses:
“Behind every
successful man, there stands a surprised woman.”
Suddenly,
India identified him as one of theirs, even though he had left India 4 decades
earlier!
“There was the
usual agonizing among some pundits there about whether it would have been
possible to win the prize by working in India… I was surprised to get letters
from the Indian president and prime minister as well.”
When he
landed in Stockholm to receive the prize:
“There is a door
right next to the plane that I had ignored my entire life. Vera and I were
whisked through that door open to some stairs to a waiting car and then to a
VIP lounge, where all the immigration formalities and our baggage were taken
care of.”
Now he
knew “how the very rich lived and why we don’t see them in immigration lines”!
When he was interviewed by the BBC where he was asked about climate change and
all sorts of issues:
“This experience
gave me a glimpse of my future life in which Nobel laureates are treated as
though they are sages and asked to pontificate about topics well outside their
area of expertise.”
And
life was never the same:
“My life after the
prize was different and not always for the better… Lots of universities wanted
to give me honorary degrees… and learned societies and academies suddenly
elected me an honorary member… The government of India decided to bestow upon
me one of their highest civilian awards… Britain decided to give me the
honorary knighthood they award foreigners.”
And so
he says:
“They were all
really rewards for getting an award and it reminded me of the line from Matthew
13:12: ‘For whoever hath, to him shall be give, and he shall have more
abundance; but whoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he
hath.”
And at
the end, he writes:
“I don’t subscribe to the heroic narrative of science. Rather, some of us are fortunate enough to be the agents of important discoveries that would have been made anyway… But this cold analytical view does not sit well with our emotional selves… (So) when someone like Newton or Einstein sees so much further than others, or Watson and Crick synthesize in one stroke the essential features of DNA that might have dribbled out in pieces, we tend to immortalize them.”
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