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Nicola Davis sits down with Nobel prize-winning scientist Sir Venki Ramakrishnan to discuss the competition he faced in the race to discover the ribosome – AKA the gene machine. Is competition good for science, or would a collaborative approach be better?

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Competition, as defined by the Oxford living dictionary, is ‘the activity or condition of striving to gain or win something by defeating or establishing superiority over others’. Organisms, including humans, compete all the time – for food, for water, for a mate, for space. But should science also operate in this way?

In his new book The Gene Machine, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sir Venki Ramakrishnan from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology writes about the competition he faced in the race to understand the ribosome – a fundamental part of how DNA is encoded into the stuff that all organisms need to develop, live and reproduce. Nicola Davis sits down with Venki to discuss the idea of competition in science – could it be driving innovation or is it damaging research?

Venkatraman "Venki" Ramakrishnan is an American and British structural biologist of Indian origin. He is the current President of the Royal Society, having held the position since November 2015. In 2009, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A.Steitz and Ada Yonath. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is photographed in his office at the Royal Society in London, England.
Photograph: Richard Saker/The Observer
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