June 22, 1939
Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Ada Yonath is born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem. Her family is poor and lives in a four-room apartment shared with two other families. Although her parents are religious, they send her to a secular school in the Beit Hakerem neighborhood. After her father dies when she is 11, the family moves to Tel Aviv.
Drawn to science, Yonath serves in the Medical Forces of the Israel Defense Forces after high school. After her military service, she enrolls at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studies chemistry, biochemistry and physics and receives a master’s. She goes on to earn a doctorate from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot. She attends MIT for her postdoctoral studies. She returns to Israel in 1970 to join the chemistry department at the Weizmann Institute, where she creates Israel’s first protein-crystallography laboratory.
Yonath devotes most of her career to uncovering the structures of the ribosomes, especially as they are active in protein biosynthesis. As she tells the Nobel Prize organization, “I was a young researcher at the Weizmann Institute with an ambitious plan to shed light on one of the major outstanding questions concerning living cells: the process of protein biosynthesis. For this aim, I wanted to determine the three-dimensional structure of the ribosome — the cells’ factory for translating the instructions written in the genetic code into proteins — and thus reveal the mechanics guiding the process. This was the beginning of a long quest that took over two decades, in which I was met with reactions of disbelief and even ridicule in the international scientific community.”
By 2000, she determines the structure of two ribosomal subunits, and Science magazine hails her achievement as one of the most important scientific discoveries of the year.
In 2009 she shares the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz for studies on the structure and function of the ribosome.
