October 7, 2009
Weizmann Institute faculty member Ada Yonath wins the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz for studies on the structure and function of the ribosome. She becomes the first woman from the Middle East to win a science Nobel and the first woman anywhere since 1964 and the fourth overall to win the chemistry prize.
She was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem during the British Mandate. Although her parents were religious Jews, they send her to a secular school in the Beit Hakerem neighborhood of Jerusalem. After her father’s death when she was 11, the family moved to Tel Aviv.
Drawn to science, she served in the Medical Forces of the IDF after her high school graduation. Upon completing her military service, she enrolled at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and studied chemistry, biochemistry and physics. After receiving her master’s at the Hebrew University, she earned a doctorate from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot. For her postdoctoral studies, she attended MIT before returning to Israel in 1970 to join the chemistry department at the Weizmann Institute, where she created Israel’s first protein-crystallography laboratory.
Yonath devoted most of her career to uncovering the structures of the ribosomes, especially in the process of protein biosynthesis.
