Professor C V Ramakrishnan, father of the Nobel Laureate Professor Sir Venkatraman (“Venki”) Ramakrishnan, passed away in Cambridge on Thursday at the age of 98.

Ramakrishnan Snr had lived in Cambridge for several years in a house that adjoined that of his daughter, Lalita Ramakrishnan, a microbiologist who is professor of immunology and infectious diseases.

Paying tribute to him, Yusuf Hamied, chairman of the Indian pharma giant, Cipla, told the Telegraph: “Every time I went to Cambridge, I made a point of seeing him. Although he lived next door to Lalita, he led a very independent existence. He did all his own (vegetarian) cooking, and would give the wonderful icecream that he made to anyone who dropped in to see him. Till the end his mind was very sharp.”

CV told The Telegraph last year (after offering his delicious home-made mango icecream): “I used to walk 12 miles daily when I first moved to Cambridge. Now that I am a little unsteady on my feet, I am sorry I have had to cut it down to eight miles.”

The trick to making the perfect icecream, he added, was to “follow the recipe like a chemistry experiment”.

CV, who moved from Tamil Nadu in 1955 to set up a new department of biochemistry at the Maharaja Sayajirao (M.S.) University of Baroda, was predeceased by his wife, R. Rajalakshmi, who was also a scientist in the department of psychology.

Venki, who has been based at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge after relocating from America in 1999, shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry with two others for his work on Ribosomes. He was also the first person of Indian origin to be president of the Royal

Society from 2015-2020. Venki did his first degree at Baroda before leaving for America to do higher studies.

He said: “My father wrote an autobiographical essay which gives you some idea of what it was like to come from a poor family around Indian independence. My sister is also an FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society) and recently received the Koch Prize for her work on tuberculosis, for which she is in Berlin at the moment – my father absolutely insisted that she should not cancel her visit.”

Last year The Telegraph asked C V what it felt to have a Nobel Prize winner as a son. He replied that Venki’s Nobel was not a surprise after his son received the Heatley Medal of the British Biochemical Society in 2008 “but when I think of him as a small boy running around, climbing trees…”

What do you call a family with no fewer than high flying professors? This was a conundrum which CV encountered in 2018 when Lalita was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at a ceremony presided over by his son.

There was applause from the audience as Lalita signed “the Charter Book and the Obligation of the Fellows of the Royal Society”. Venki’s name is on an ancient board alongside those of past presidents, among them Sir Isaac Newton.

Venki has written: “I was born in 1952 in Chidambaram, an ancient temple town in Tamil Nadu best known for its temple of Nataraja, the lord of dance. When I was born, my father, C.V. Ramakrishnan, was away on a postdoctoral fellowship in Madison, Wisconsin. Because he came from a poor family, he did not think that he could support my mother and me on his postdoctoral income, so he went alone.

“In fact, I first saw him when I was about six months old. My mother, R. Rajalakshmi, taught at Annamalai University in Chidambaram, and during the day, I was well cared for by aunts and grandparents in the usual way of an extended Indian family. When I was about a year and a half, my father left again, this time with my mother, to go to Ottawa on a National Research Council fellowship. They returned a little over a year later, and during their absence I was brought up by my grandmother and my aunt Gomathi.

“When I was three, my parents moved to Baroda, where my father was appointed at an unusually young age to head a new department of biochemistry at the Maharaja Sayajirao (M.S.) University of Baroda. When he started the department, there was just some empty lab space with no equipment or people. He managed to acquire a low-speed table-top centrifuge, and would get blocks of ice from a nearby ice factory, crush them, and place them around the centrifuge so that his samples would remain cold during enzyme purification. With this setup he managed to publish two papers in Nature in quick succession. Within a few years, the department was well established in both teaching and research, and equipped with instruments, a cold room and an animal house.

“Unusually for an Indian man of his generation, my father, being aware of my mother’s intellectual abilities, encouraged her to go abroad by herself to obtain a Ph.D. She obtained a fellowship in McGill University to do a Ph.D. in psychology. When she returned, she could not find a suitable position in the Psychology Department in Baroda. Instead she used her analytical skills to help my father in his research. This was the beginning of a lifelong collaboration in their work. “

“Shortly after my sister Lalita was born in 1959, my family went to Adelaide, Australia, in 1960–61.”

Venki said he had found a “Short note about me” in which his father had written: “I am the eighth child of my parents. When I was born my father was retired and had a pension of 50 rupees.

“I had my mother’s breast milk till I was 3 years old. Breast milk is a good nutritive food. I started getting sick only after I went abroad and started eating junk food.

“My son and daughter followed my path and are now top scientists in Cambridge. I decided to give away all my savings to give college education to poor children. My life will show anybody who faces life with confidence and will power can come up.”