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VENKATRAMAN RAMAKRISHNAN: Born in 1952 in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India, he is a U.S. citizen. Indian origin senior scientist at the MRC Laborartory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2009 along with two others. The Nobel Committee announced on Wednesday that the Tamil Nadu born Ramakrishnan shares the Nobel Prize with Thomas E Steitz (US) and Ada E Yonath (Israel) for their “studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”. Ramakrishnan graduated in B.Sc. in Physics from Baroda University in 1971 and did Ph.D. in Physics in 1976 from Ohio University.“This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry awards Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A Steitz and Ada E Yonath for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level,” the Nobel committee said. All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome, it said. “This year’s three Laureates have all generated 3D models that show how different antibiotics bind to the ribosome. These models are now used by scientists to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity’s suffering,” the citation said.

 AMARTYA SEN (b-1933) : Prof. Amartya Sen is the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics for the year 1998, becoming the first Asian to have been honored with the award. The Santiniketan-born economist who is a pioneer in Welfare Economics has to his credit several books and papers on aspects of welfare and development. An economist with a difference,     Prof. Sen is a humanist. He has distinguished himself with his outstanding writings on famine, poverty, democracy, gender and social issues. The ‘impossibility theorem’ suggested earlier by Kenneth Arrow states that it was not possible to aggregate individual choices into a satisfactory choice for society as a whole. Prof. Sen showed mathematically that  societies could find ways to alleviate such a poor outcome.






 SUBRAMANIAN CHANDRASHEKAR (1910-1995) : The Nobel Prize for Physics in 1983 was awarded to Dr S. Chandrashekar, an Indian-born astrophysicist. Educated in Presidency College, Chennai, Dr. Chandrashekar happened to be the nephew of his Nobel forbear, Sir C.V. Raman. He later migrated to the United States where he authored several books on Astrophysics and Stellar Dynamics. He developed a theory on white dwarf stars which posts a limit of mass of dwarf stars known also as Chandrashekar Limit. His theory explains the final stages of stellar evolution.








 MOTHER TERESA (1910-1997) : The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Mother Teresa in 1979. Albanian parentage, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born at Skopje, now in Yogoslavia. She joined the Irish order of the Sisters of Loretto at Dublin in 1928 and came to Kolkata in 1929 as a missionary, only to find the misery of the abandoned and the destitute. Concern for the poor and the sick prompted her to found a new congregation, Missionaries of Charity. Having become an Indian citizen, Mother Teresa served the cause of dying destitute’s, lepers and drug addicts, through Nirmal Hriday (meaning Pure Heart), the main centre of her activity. Her selfless service and unique devotion, not only to helpless fellow-Indians but also to the cause of world peace, earned her and India the first Nobel Peace Prize.






 HARGOBIND KHORANA (b. 1922) : Hargobind Khorana was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1968. Of Indian origin, Dr Khorana was born in Raipur, Punjab (now in Pakistan). He took his doctoral degree in Chemistry from Liverpool University and joined the University of Wisconsin as a Faculty Member in 1960. His major breakthrough in the field of Medicine—interpreting the genetic code and analyzing its function in protein synthesis—fetched him the Nobel Prize.









CHANDRASHEKAR VENKATARAMAN (1888-1970) : India’s first Nobel Prize for Physics was claimed in 1930 by the renowned physicist Sir C.V. Raman. Born at Thiruvanaikkaval near  iruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu, Raman studied at Presidency College, Chennai. Later, he served as Professor of Physics at Calcutta University. Recipient of many honors and awards, including the title of ‘Sir’, Sir C.V. Raman received the Nobel Prize for an important optics  research, in which he discovered that diffused light contained rays of other wavelengths—what is now popularly known as Raman Effect. His theory discovered in 1928 explains the change in the frequency of light passing through a transparent medium.







RABINDRANATH TAGORE (1861-1941) : Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian ever to receive a Nobel Prize. Popularly known as Gurudev, India’s Poet Laureate Tagore was born on 7 May 1861 in Kolkata. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of his work Geetanjali, a  collection of poems, in 1913. Tagore wrote many love lyrics. Geetanjali and Sadhana are among his important works. The poet, dramatist and novelist is also the author of India’s National Anthem. In 1901 he founded the famous Santiniketan which later came to be known as Vishwabharati University.