UPDATE, 9/7/2009, 2:52 pm ET: *** A SAJA member tells us that a journalist colleague who spoke to Ramakrishnan confirms he is a U.S. citizen.
UPDATE: 9/7/2009, 11 am ET: There was some confusion about Ramakrishnan's citizenship. The NYT says he's a U.S. citizen, as does Wikipedia. But as the screengrabs below, the Nobel folks say he's British. They also changed his photo thrice (going live with no photo at first - all the pix below). Use the comments section or sree[at]sree.net.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a Cambridge professor who is a US citizen who was born in Tamil Nadu, India, wins the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Thomas Steitz, an American citizen at Yale and Ada E. Yonathan, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot. From the Yale press release: All three used a technology 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. The knowledge of the ribosome has created targets for a new generation of antibiotics. The instruction manual for the creation of proteins is DNA, but the ribosome is the machine which takes information transcribed onto messenger RNA and turns it into proteins. Read details at NobelPrize.org. More here throughout the day.
The Nobel Lectures in Chemistry will be held on Tuesday, 8 December 2009, at the Aula Magna, Stockholm University. The lectures will be published on this site after that.
Here is the latest screengrab from NobelPrize.org (scroll down to see the previous two versions):
From the SAJA Stylebook for Covering South Asia and the Diaspora:
Several people associated with South Asia have won Nobel Prizes. In chronological order: Ronald Ross (Medicine, 1902); Rudyard Kipling (Literature, 1907); Rabindranath Tagore (Literature, 1913); Sir C.V. Raman (Physics, 1930); Har Gobind Khorana (Medicine, 1968); Abdus Salam (Physics, 1979); Mother Teresa (Peace, 1979); Subramanyan Chandrasekhar (Physics, 1983); Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama (Peace, 1989); Amartya Sen (Economics, 1998); V.S. Naipaul (Literature, 2001); Dr. Mohammed Yunus (Peace, 2006); Rajendra K. Pachauri received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which he leads), sharing it with Al Gore. Interestingly, Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi never won the Nobel Peace Prize. Reuters reported in early 1998 that the reason for not selecting the leader of India's struggle for independence was Norway's friendship with Britain after World War II. Hundreds of documents in a basement safe at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, made available to Reuters after a 50-year secrecy rule, showed that Gandhi was nominated but did not win in 1937, 1947 and 1948. Historians say the five-man jury in the 1930s and '40s was pro-British and had a patronizing attitude to candidates from the developing world. "If I were to guess, one factor which made it difficult to give the prize to Gandhi was the very strong pro-British orientation in Norway 's foreign policy," said Geir Lundestad, director of the Nobel Institute.
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These are screengrabs of the Nobel site, in chronological order:
