A Life in Science

• 1922 - Birth and Early Life

  Gopalasamudram Narayana Iyer Ramachandran was the first son born to Lakshmi Ammal and G R Narayana Iyer in the Ernakulam district of Kerala. G R Narayana Iyer was then a Professor of Mathematics at Maharajas College in Ernakulam and later became the principal of the college. He hailed from the Tirunelveli district in Tamil Nadu, from a village named Gopalasamudram, which inspired Ramachandran’s first name.

• 1939 - 1942 - Undergraduate years

  After completing his Secondary and Higher Secondary courses in a school in Ernakulam, a 17-year old Ramachandran joined a BSc (honours) program to study Physics and Chemistry at St. Joseph’s College in Trichy. Under his father’s meticulous training, Ramachandran had developed a fondness for mathematics. G R Narayana Iyer, however, was of the opinion that Ramachandran would not gain anything from taking mathematics. Ramachandran discovered his passion for physics during this course. He achieved first rank across all colleges under Madras Presidency, joining the illustrious ranks of C V Raman and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

• 1942-1947 - Master's and Doctorate from IISc

  In 1942, Ramachandran joined the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru. He was granted admission in the Electric Engineering department, but he desperately wanted to work with C V Raman, having heard of his legend. Raman finally arranged for him to switch departments. Under Raman, Ramachandran began his training as an x-ray crystallographer. In 1944, he received his Masters’ for his thesis ‘Optics of Heterogeneous Media’. He continued working in Raman’s lab, now for a D.Sc. In 1947-48, he was awarded a D.Sc. for his thesis ‘Photoelastic constants of diamond corrections.’

• 1947-1949 - Cambridge

  Towards the end of his D.Sc. at IISc, Ramachandran received a scholarship from the Royal Commissioners of the 1851 Exhibition in England which allowed him to pursue a second doctorate from Cambridge. Ramachandran decided to join the Cavendish Laboratory, then headed by Lawrence Bragg, whose early work led to the origin of x-ray crystallography. Ramachandran’s supervisor was W A Wooster, who was interested in the crystallography of diamond, quartz and other crystals of industrial interest. Ramachandran’s work was a mix of instrumentation and mathematical theory to describe x-ray diffraction to determine the elastic constants of crystals. In 1949, he received his PhD on the basis of his thesis ‘Determination of Elastic Constants of Crystals from Measurements of Diffuse x-ray Reflections.’

  During his PhD in Cambridge, Ramachandran interacted with some early Structural Biologists like John Kendrew, Max Perutz, John Bernal, Dorothy Hodgkin, and Lawrence Bragg. He also got a chance to meet a visiting Linus Pauling, an incident that was deeply influential for the young scientist. As with Raman, Ramachandran began to look for avenues that would enable him to work in Pauling’s department in the California Institute of Technology. Unfortunately for Ramachandran (but fortunately for the fate of structural biology in India), there was no opening at the time. In any case, the captivating idea of applying crystallography to explore biomolecules had entranced Ramachandran.

  History of Structural Biology

• 1949-1951 - First faculty appointment at IISc

  In the June of 1949, Ramachandran returned to the the Physics Department at IISc, now as Assistant Professor and the resident X-ray crystallography expert. His first crop of Ph.D. students included Gopinath Kartha, who would soon be widely recognized as a gifted crystallographer. This was the start of a partnership that would become very significant for Structural Chemistry and Biology in India. During this period, Ramachandran’s group focused on the structures of inorganic structures, particularly heavy-atom molecules. In 1952, Ramachandran was presented with a career-defining opportunity which would cut short his stay at IISc.

• 1952 - Professor and Head of Department at 30!

  In 1952, Ramachandran was presented with a career-defining opportunity which would cut short his stay at IISc. Dr AL Mudaliar, the Vice-Chancellor of Madras University at the time, wanted Madras University to have a physics department where world-class research would be conducted, and was looking for someone to build and head this department. He wrote to his first choice for this post, Prof C.V. Raman. Raman, who had left IISc in 1948 and founded the Raman Research Institute, was busy trying to realize similar aspirations for his own institute. However, he recommended Ramachandran for the post, ahead of more established physicists in India at the time.

  Institution Building

• 1953-1955 - The beginning of Structural Biology in India

  As G N Ramachandran went about setting up his department of experimental physics (which was essentially the department of x-ray crystallography), he was still looking for an entry-point to pursue biophysics. Two lucky events led him to work on the structure of collagen.

  Under two years of working on this problem, Ramachandran and Gopinath Kartha (now a Post-Doc) published a structure in 1954, then refined it and published it in 1955. The 1955 paper was the first to identify the collagen helix motif as a triple-helical coiled coil. A more detailed narrative of the events that led to the solution of the collagen structure, its immediate impact and its impact to this day can be found in

  Collagen Chronicles

• 1956 - A notable contribution to Anomalous Dispersion

  While Ramachandran’s department was making strides in Biophysics, they did not lose sight of progress in crystallography. Ramachandran and S Raman demonstrated the proof of concept of using Anomalous Scattering to solve the phase problem by determining the known structure of ephedrine hydrochloride. This paper was significant as it helped open the floodgates to determination of structures of non centrosymmetric crystals.

• 1956-1963 - The Ramachandran Map

  Ramachandran and V Sasisekharan continued the work on collagen. In particular, the short-contact problem of the Ramachandran and Kartha model of collagen as identified by Francis Crick and Alexander Rich. They realized that the criteria of the short-contacts problem needed rethinking. Introducing a new parameter to study proteins - torsion angles - they backed up their idea by designing a rigorous simulation to check all possible amino-acid conformations that would lead to short contacts. C Ramakrishnan, then a PhD student who would later become one of India’s first computational biologists, systematically completed this simulation involving thousands of calculations without a computer or modern calculator. In 1963, they first published this concept that would become synonymous with understanding protein secondary structures.

  The Ramachandran Map

• 1963 and 1967 - International Symposia in Chennai

  On the back of the Madras Triple Helix and connections Ramachandran forged during international trips, he decided to organise the first International Symposium/Conference by a University in independent India in 1963. Presided by C V Raman, the participants included Severo Ochoa, Stanford Moore, Wolfie Traub, Ephraim Katzir and David Phillips. A second international symposium was organised in 1967, presided over by Linus Pauling. These symposia were significant as milestones of the department's quality of work and recognition, as well as setting a culture of crosstalk between Indian groups and the global community of biophysicists. Details of the Symposia and its impact can be found in

  Institution Building

• 1970 - Back to IISc to build a second department

  A L Mudaliar’s term as Vice-Chancellor ended in 1969. Ramachandran found it difficult to work without the degree of administrative support that he received from Mudaliar. This is perhaps a testament to the administrative outlook and vision of Mudaliar for research in Madras University. Satish Dhawan invited him to start a department in IISc, his alma mater. In 1970, Ramachandran went to Bengaluru to establish the Molecular Biophysics Unit with a few faculty from his department in Madras University.

• 1970-71 - Visiting Professorship at the University of Chicago

  In 1967, Ramachandran was appointed a part-time Professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Biophysics. He was unable to visit until 1970, when he decided to spend a year in Chicago. During this period, he and his student A V Lakshminarayan mathematically worked out a technique to use projections or ‘shadows’ to reconstruct a 3D model of an object. Unfortunately, Ramachandran was short of resources to construct a device to back their technique in practice. The Computed Axial Tomography (CAT) technique in medical imaging was developed with a similar conceptual basis.