Professor Ada Yonath is the ninth Israeli, and the first Israeli woman, to win a Nobel prize. She won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for her research on the ribosome, which produces cell protein. The ribosome is part of the mechanism that translates the DNA sequence into the protein sequence that carry out the instructions of the genome in building and maintaining the living body. This is a most basic mechanism in the body, and understanding it is likely to bring many new drugs into the world, particularly antibiotics, since ribosome operates in bacteria cells as well.
Yonath told "Globes" in the past that decoding ribosome had been described as the second most important achievement in biology, after decoding of the genome.
This is the second time the Nobel Prize for Chemistry has gone to Israeli science, and the first time the prize has been won by a researcher from the Weizmann Institute, where Yonath is director of The Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly.
Nobel prizes in science have previously been won by Professors Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko of the Haifa Technion, by Robert Yisrael Aumann of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and by Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli by origin, who currently works at Princeton University.
In congratulating Professor Yonath on the award, the Weizmann Institute said, "We are happy and proud that the Nobel Prize Committee has recognized the importance of the Professor Yonath's scientific work and awarded her this important prize. Professor Yonath is an example of the way scientific vision, courage in choosing a big scientific question, and dedication to the goal, can lead to success and to a broadening of human knowledge to the benefit of mankind everywhere. Professor Yonath's research was motivated by curiosity and the aspiration to gain a better understanding of the world and of our place in it."
A shared prize
Yonath shares the prize with two other researchers in the field of the ribosome: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of Cambridge University and Thomas Steitz of Yale.
The Nobel Committee said in its announcement that the three were awarded the prize "for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.
"Inside every cell in all organisms, there are DNA molecules. They contain the blueprints for how a human being, a plant or a bacterium, looks and functions. But the DNA molecule is passive. If there was nothing else, there would be no life.
"The blueprints become transformed into living matter through the work of ribosomes. Based upon the information in DNA, ribosomes make proteins: oxygen-transporting haemoglobin, antibodies of the immune system, hormones such as insulin, the collagen of the skin, or enzymes that break down sugar. There are tens of thousands of proteins in the body and they all have different forms and functions. They build and control life at the chemical level."
If the ribosome of a bacterium is blocked, it cannot subsist, and already several antibiotics are based on this. Through understanding of the precise structure of the ribosome, such as the prize winners have achieved, molecules can be designed that block its action more effectively. Professor Yonath has participated in the development of some of these drugs. She said today, "The new progress we have achieved in the long campaign to decipher the structure and action of the ribosome could pave the way to more effective antibiotics in the future, antibiotics that will designed to stop the ribosome activity of disease-causing bacteria. That understanding could perhaps help us in the future to stop the uncontrolled processes of protein generation that cause various diseases, including cancer."
Parental encouragement
Professor Ada Yonath was born in Jerusalem to a poor family, but although her parents were uneducated, they always encouraged their daughter to acquire an education. She lost her father at a young age, after which the family moved to Tel Aviv, where Yonath helped to support her mother and sister, while pursuing her studies.
Yonath completed a first degree in chemistry and a second degree in biochemistry at the Hebrew University, and took her doctorate at the Weizmann Institute. She has taught and carried out research at, among other places, MIT, the Mellon Institute, and the University of Chicago in the US, and the Maz Planck Institute in Germany.
In an interview with "Globes", on the occasion of her being named by the newspaper as one of the most influential women in Israel in 2008, Yonath said, "Deciphering the precise structure of the ribosome was considered an extremely complicated project for research in the life sciences. It required scientific courage, original thinking, and innovative and unconventional developments. In the first four of five years it was also hard to finance it and to attract students and scientist of the first rank."
Yonath explained in that interview that her vision was to continue in research, in the hope that her future contribution would be a direct continuation of the past. The sources of inspiration she mentioned were "creative people, critical and logical." She said that "the guiding principle of my scientific conduct could be summed up as 'to follow where curiosity leads, and not to be deterred by difficulties.'"
In her lecture on receiving the Israel Prize, she said that "when I started working in the filed, the number of three-dimensional structures of biological molecules that were known with atomic precision was smaller than the number of fingers on the hand. Only a few knew of the existence of this field, and of them only some saw the huge potential latent in it."
In recent years, Professor Yonath has been showered with prestigious honors and awards, among them the Israel Prize, an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the Albert Einstein World Award of Science from Princeton University, and the UNESCO-L'Oréal Award for European Woman in Life Science.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on October 7, 2009
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2009