- Lived:
- born Ernakulam, in the princely state of Cochin (Kerala), 8 October 1922; the work happened in Bangalore, Cambridge, and above all Madras (Chennai), where he died on 7 April 2001
- Field:
- biophysics — the physics of the molecules of life; founder of the "Madras group" of structural biology
- The Big Idea:
- He solved the triple-helix architecture of collagen, the protein that holds your body together — and then drew a simple two-axis map, the Ramachandran plot, showing which protein shapes the laws of geometry permit at all. Every protein structure determined anywhere on earth is still checked against it.
- In their words:
- Pauling's α-helix, the young Ramachandran wrote admiringly, had "opened the path" to the structures of all the molecules of life — and it was his own map, a decade later, that fenced and signposted that path.
- If you remember one thing:
- Thousands of scientists type the name Ramachandran every working day, because their software will not pass a protein structure until his 1963 diagram approves it — and almost none of them know the name belongs to a man who did the work in 1950s Madras, with samples begged from the leather institute next door.