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The thrilling story of how scientists unlocked a new window onto how life works

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From Nobel Prize winner Venki Ramakrishnan

´Beyond superb´ Bill Bryson

´A wonderful book´ Ian McEwan

Everyone knows about DNA, the essence of our being, the molecule where our genes reside. But DNA by itself is useless without a machine to decode the genetic information it contains. The ribosome is that machine . Venki Ramakrishnan tells the story of the race to uncover its enormously complex structure, a fundamental breakthrough that resolves an ancient mystery of life itself.

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´A must-read for anyone interested in a glimpse of the messy business - rivalries, failed experiments, the frustration of mistakes - of how science happens.´
The Times

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Venki Ramakrishnan is a structural biologist who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the structure and function of the ribosome. He was knighted in 2012 and elected president of the Royal Society in 2015. He works at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

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