Lalita Ramakrishnan facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Lalita Ramakrishnan
FRS FMedSci
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Ramakrishnan in 2018
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| Born | 1959 (age 65–66) |
| Alma mater | Baroda Medical College Tufts University |
| Spouse(s) | Mark Troll |
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| Relatives | Venki Ramakrishnan (brother) |
| Awards | Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2015) EMBO Member (2019) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Microbiology Immunology Infectious diseases |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge University of Washington |
| Thesis | Abelson virus-transformed cells as models of early B lymphocyte differentiation (1990) |
Lalita Ramakrishnan (born 1959) is a scientist from India and America. She is a microbiologist, which means she studies very tiny living things like bacteria. Dr. Ramakrishnan is famous for helping us understand how tuberculosis (TB) works in the body.
As of 2019, she is a professor at the University of Cambridge in England. There, she teaches about how our bodies fight off sickness (immunology) and about diseases that can spread (infectious diseases). She is also a doctor who helps patients. Her research happens at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. She helped create a special way to study TB using a type of fish called Mycobacterium marinum. Her discoveries have been shared in top science magazines like Science and Nature.
Early Life and School
Lalita Ramakrishnan was born in 1959 in a city called Baroda (now Vadodara) in India. She grew up there. Both her parents were scientists, and so is her brother, Venki Ramakrishnan, who won a Nobel Prize! When Lalita was a child, her mother got spinal tuberculosis three times.
In high school, Lalita was very good at math and physics. She started medical school at age 17, which is common in India. In 1983, she earned her medical degree from Baroda Medical College.
After taking a class on immunology, which is the study of the body's immune system, she decided to focus on it. In 1990, she earned her PhD in Immunology from Tufts University in the United States. She was the first international student to complete the medical residency program at Tufts Medical Center. Later, she did more research at Stanford University. There, she developed a new way to study tuberculosis. She used Mycobacterium marinum bacteria to infect zebrafish. This helped scientists learn more about how TB affects humans.
Career and Discoveries
In 2001, Dr. Ramakrishnan joined the University of Washington. She worked as both a scientist and a doctor specializing in infectious diseases. While there, she became a leader in studying tuberculosis using zebrafish. This was a big step because zebrafish are see-through when they are young. This allowed her to watch the infection happen inside them. She could also change the genes of the fish and the bacteria. This helped her understand how the disease develops in detail.
In 2014, Dr. Ramakrishnan moved to the University of Cambridge. She continued her important research there. Her work has shown how bacteria and the body's cells interact during an infection. These discoveries could lead to new ways to treat tuberculosis.
She found that two types of fatty molecules on the surface of the TB bacteria help them hide from immune cells called macrophages. Instead of being killed, the bacteria enter these macrophages and use them to grow. She also discovered that the bacteria make the body form structures called granulomas. Normally, granulomas protect the body, but in TB, they actually help the bacteria stay safe. Later, the infected macrophages in the granulomas die, which makes the bacteria grow even faster and the disease get worse. These findings have led to new treatments that target the body's own cells to fight TB. Her team also found a drug that helps stop TB bacteria from becoming resistant to the usual medicines.
Dr. Ramakrishnan also used zebrafish to study leprosy, another serious disease. She found that a fatty molecule from the leprosy bacteria causes nerve damage. It does this by making macrophages react in an unusual way.
Besides her lab work, Dr. Ramakrishnan also looked at studies about "latent tuberculosis." This is the idea that many people have TB bacteria in their bodies but don't get sick right away. She and her colleagues found that TB usually develops within a few months after infection, rarely more than two years later. They showed that most people infected with TB bacteria for more than two years will never get sick, even if their immune system is weak.
Tests for TB infection only show if someone has been infected in the past. They don't mean the person will get sick. Dr. Ramakrishnan told The New York Times that a lot of money has been spent chasing the idea of "latent" TB. She believes the idea that a quarter of the world is infected with TB is based on a misunderstanding.
Her findings were supported by Soumya Swaminathan, a leader at the World Health Organization. This work suggests that research money should go to places where TB is a bigger problem, not just wealthy countries. Earlier, some researchers thought there would be a huge increase in TB cases in places like the US. Dr. Ramakrishnan's work has shown that this might not be true.
Awards and Recognitions
Dr. Ramakrishnan has received many important awards for her work. In 2015, she became a Member of the National Academy of Sciences in the US. She also received an award from the National Institutes of Health and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. In 2018, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci). In 2019, she became a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).
