Ada Yonath

Born on 22 June 1939 in Jerusalem, Ada Yonath is a crystallographer who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work deciphering the structure of the ribosome. She grew up poor in an apartment with two other families. Following her mandatory military service, Yonath studied chemistry, biochemistry, and biophysics, earning a PhD from the Weizmann Institute in 1968. At Weizmann, Yonath established the first biological crystallography lab in Israel, where in the early 1980s she began an ambitious project to determine the three-dimensional structure of the ribosome. She focused on this component of the cell because it synthesizes proteins that are vital for life. During her quest Yonath found that ribosomes contain tiny tunnels where proteins move along like on a factory line, and she developed a technique to cool ribosome crystals for better study with x rays. In 2000 and 2001 her group published the complete ribosome structure. Her hugely important research has improved scientists’ understanding of how our cells function and how ribosomes are affected by various antibiotics. Yonath shared the 2009 chemistry Nobel with Thomas Steitz and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan. (Photo credit: Weizmann Institute of Science, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, W. F. Meggers Gallery of Nobel Laureates Collection)

Date in History: 22 June 1939