Asserting that providing good health care is one of the major responsibilities of the government, Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan today hailed the national health service in Britain.

"Health care is one of the responsibilities of a government. One thing that we in Britain are proud of is the national health service. The poorest person in Britain gets the same treatment that a senior scientist at the MRC gets. There is no preference, I don't get pushed ahead in line. I have to wait my turn," the Indian-born scientist said.

"There used to be public health care in India. But somehow, it is deteriorated. I have not lived here. So, I don't know. But, this is just what I hear," said Ramakrishnan, who works at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK.

He was speaking to reporters after delivering a lecture on "Antibiotics and the Cell's Protein Factory" at CSIR-Centre for Cellular Molecular Biology (CCMB) here.

To a question, he said he cannot offer any suggestions on social health care for India, as he had not lived here, but there was no dearth of talented health care professionals in the country, and they should be consulted.

"There are hundreds, thousands of superb, dedicated Indian health professionals at the top medical schools, people who work in the field. These are people who have ideas, they should be asked what the solutions are. There is no shortage of excellent people here," he said.

He also spoke about the need for rational use of antibiotics, and favoured regulation of over the counter sale of medicines. "It should be only prescription-based," he said.

Preventive medicine was more cost-effective than later treatment, he added.

Asked about further discoveries in ribosomes, Ramakrishnan, who received Nobel Prize for Chemistry along with two others in 2009 for "studies of the structure and function of the ribosome", said that understanding how ribosomes of humans differ from ribosomes of bacteria and other related aspects are important issues.

"Ribosomes don't make all proteins at the same rate. Some proteins are made very efficiently. So, this process called translational regulation, when a proteins made, how much are made. This idea of how ribosomes are regulated, at which point they make things, that is a big step.

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'Health Care Is Govt's Responsibility'