Historic royal honour for scientist
ORDER OF MERIT BESTOWED ON PROFESSOR SIR VENKATARAMAN RAMAKRISHNAN
PROFESSOR Sir Venkatraman (“Venki”) Ramakrishnan, who shared the Nobel Prize for chemistry with two other scientists in 2009 and was president of the Royal Society from 2015 to 2020, has been appointed to the Order of Merit by King Charles.
Venki is thought to be the first person of Asian origin ever to have been honoured in this way.
The order is in the gift of the monarch and has been dubbed “the most prestigious honour on earth”. The number of people who belong to the order is restricted to 24. Established by Edward VII in 1902, it is bestowed on those in Britain and the Commonwealth who have made exceptional contributions in the arts and sciences as well as public life.
This time six were chosen by the Queen before her death on September 8.
Apart from Venki, the new appointments are Sir David Adjaye, a GhanaianBritish architect; Professor Dame Elizabeth Anionwu, the UK’s first sickle-cell nursing specialist; Baroness Floella Benjamin, the broadcaster who chairs the Windrush Commemoration Committee; Professor Margaret MacMillan, a Canadian who is an Oxford University history professor; and Sir Paul Nurse, the director of the Francis Crick Institute, also a Nobel Laureate and Venki’s immediate predecessor as Royal Society president. As well as becoming a more diverse membership, the new appointees will increase the number of women in the order from two to five.
The 19 other current members include: Norman Foster (architect); Sir Roger Penrose (mathematician); Sir Tom Stoppard (playwright); the king from the time he was the Prince of Wales; Lord Rothschild (investment banker); Sir David Attenborough (broadcaster); Baroness Boothroyd (former speaker of the Commons); Lord Eames (former Primate of All Ireland); Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web); Lord Rees (Astronomer Royal); Jean Chrétien (former Canadian prime minister); Neil MacGregor (former director of the British Museum); David Hockney (artist); John Howard (former Australian prime minister); Sir Simon Rattle (conductor); Sir Magdi Yacoub (heart surgeon); Lord Darzi (surgeon); Dame Ann Dowling (mechanical engineer); and Sir James Dyson (industrial inventor).
Honorary members can also be added, which in the past have included South African president Nelson Mandela and US president Dwight Eisenhower.
On the occasion of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee earlier this year, Sotheby’s magazine carried a piece on the medal’s history by historian Dr Dominic Green.
He said: “The Order of Merit recognises ‘exceptionally meritorious service’ in the military, the sciences, arts and literature. Restricted to 24 recipients (plus a small number of honorary members who are not British subjects or Commonwealth citizens), the ‘OM’ is one of the most exclusive clubs on earth, and certainly the most accomplished. It is also the most personal of royal awards, for both recipient and giver. Admission is in the personal gift of the Sovereign. The evolution of its membership is a form of royal autobiography, written in patronage.”
Green continued: “Elizabeth II has ruled for more than half of the Order’s existence, and has appointed just over half of its appointees, 97 out of 195. Like her predecessors, she has used the OM to build connections to the Commonwealth... and to favour innovative doctors and scientists, including her first female choice, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1965).”
He went on: “The Order was founded in 1902, to mark the coronation of King Edward VII. He chose a full spectrum of eminent Victorians. The moustachioed builders of empire were first on the list: Lord Kitchener, Field Marshal Roberts and Garnet Wolseley.
“Edward VII also made Florence Nightingale (1907) the first female member. His heir, King George V, made a promising start with Thomas Hardy (1910), Sir Edward Elgar (1911) and Henry James (1916). James, the master of the long sentence, became the shortest-lived OM, lasting only six weeks; the longest-serving OM was the Duke of Edinburgh (19682021), a master of the short sentence.
“The architects of the First World War dominated the selections of the 1920s. As for art, when George V and his consort Queen Mary made the first royal visit to the National Gallery in 1934, the king told the Gallery’s director Kenneth Clark (1976) that JMW Turner had been ‘mad’.
“King Edward VIII, having picked Mrs. Simpson as his queen, failed to pick anyone before he abdicated. His brother George VI found, like his father before him, that a world war defined his choices.
The bohemian painter Augustus John (1942) was alone, among the generals, until he was joined by TS Eliot (1948) and Bertrand Russell (1949).
“Elizabeth II’s early reign was defined by imperial entropy and the redefinition of Britain as a soft-power superpower. The last viceroy of India, Earl Mountbatten (1965), was the last military OM to date. The Queen bolstered the poets with Walter de la Mare (1953) and the painters with Graham Sutherland (1960), whose portrait displeased his fellow OM Winston Churchill (1965). Her other choices in the 60s included composer Benjamin Britten (1965), novelist EM Forster (1969) and sculptor Henry Moore (1963).
“The arts continued to rise in the OM’s ranks through the 1970s, with Kenneth Clark (1976); and the first theatrical nominees, the ballet dancer and choreographer Freddie Ashton (1977) and Laurence Olivier (1981). Today, the longest-serving living member is Norman Foster.
“Rudyard Kipling and Francis Bacon were rare refusals, and David Hockney (2012) accepted because ‘it would have been ungracious to turn it down,’ but Lucian Freud (1993) accepted wholeheartedly.
“When an OM dies, the medal is returned to Buckingham Palace to await dispatch to the next recipient. The earlier custodians of Freud’s badge had included Thomas Hardy. Today, there are five badges awaiting allocation.”
The vacancies, which rose to six, have now been filled.