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.”