Venki Ramakrishnan: It’s right at the crossroads of biology. In fact, the ribosome is older than DNA or proteins. It’s the molecule that produces proteins, and it goes back to a world where probably there was no DNA, and RNA was the genetic material. It’s called the RNA World Hypothesis. We can talk about that in a second. But I knew it was important. I also felt that the technology had changed to make certain kinds of experiments possible with crystallography, which used synchrotrons, and the fact that you can choose the wavelength of x-rays very precisely to get a signal from certain special atoms that you’ve put into the structure. So I knew that there was a breakthrough possible. I wasn’t absolutely sure, and so I took a 40-percent pay cut to move from the U.S. to England because I didn’t know how long it would take. I didn’t know how long it would take to get crystals that were good enough or how long it would take to actually solve the structure. Because, as I said, a group had been working on a different crystal form of a different part of the ribosome for almost 15 years and there hadn’t been any real breakthroughs in terms of actual structures. So I thought, “Maybe there are some real problems that I may come across, and I don’t know how long it will take.”