Professor Comaralingam V. Ramakrishnan, father of Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan, passed away on Friday in Cambridge, United Kingdom, where he resided with his daughter Lalita, a scientist of international renown for her research on tuberculosis. He was 98 years old.
Known affectionately as Prof CVR, he established the Department of Biochemistry at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (MSU) in Vadodara in 1955, serving as its first head at a notably young age.
Earlier, Prof Venki Ramakrishnan told a section of media that his father would have turned 99 in January next year.
“Apart from his impact on education in India, his own children did unusually well in academics and I am sure the reason is that he and my mother created an environment where education was valued,” Venki said.
Born in Coimbatore, Prof Ramakrishnan grew up in Kancheepuram, Tamil Nadu, before moving with his family to Vadodara, Gujarat, in 1955. Venki later went to the MS University and the Convent of Jesus & Mary School in Vadodara.
Prof Ramakrishnan completed his postdoctoral fellowship in Madison, Wisconsin, in the United States in 1952, while still based in Chidambaram.
He continued to visit India regularly until 2019. The Dr Vikram Sarabhai Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology, established in 2012 at MSU, benefited from his guidance following Prof Venki’s Nobel Prize win in Chemistry in 2009.
In December 2010, he visited Vadodara with Venki, where they were honoured in ceremonies at both the school and MSU.
He engaged with MSU students on his last visit to Vadodara in 2019 and in 2021, he took part in a webinar co-hosted by the university to celebrate his 96th birthday.
One of his students, Professor RK Rao of the University of Tennessee’s Department of Physiology, coordinated the virtual celebration. During the webinar, Prof Ramakrishnan, who is well-known for his sense of humour, is heard saying to a student from the 1980-batch, “You have grown much older than me, so I am not able to identify you.”
MSU officials stated that with the Diwali vacation on until November 17, a memorial service will be scheduled to pay tribute to Ramakrishnan once the session resumes.
In order to raise their daughter Lalita Ramakrishnan, Prof Ramakrishnan and his wife Rajalakshmi moved to the United States in the 1980s. They initially settled in Palo Alto before moving to Seattle in 2001. Prof Ramakrishnan moved to Cambridge, UK in 2014 to be near his daughter Lalita, a renowned scientist who won the prestigious Koch Prize for her study on tuberculosis.
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