“Everything in our cells is either made by the ribosome, or made by another molecule that itself was made by the ribosome” says Professor Venki Ramakrishnan, one of the handful of experts to unpick the secrets of this powerhouse of life.
And as well as being a universal fabricator – shared in essence by every living thing – the ribosome could be the most direct connection within us to the very origins of life, that warm pond of chemicals 4 billion years ago, where self-replicating molecules, perhaps made of RNA like the heart of the ribosome, started the long ascent to complexity.