Ada Yonath
Israeli structural biologist and Nobel laureate (1939-2026) · Israel · Scientists · Died at 87
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Something wrong?She cracked the structure of the ribosome - the molecular machine that reads genetic instructions and builds every protein in every living cell - work so fundamental it earned her the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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About this person
Ada Yonath was born on 22 June 1939 and became a crystallographer, eventually directing the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her pioneering studies on ribosome structure and function, conducted over decades, revealed how this cellular machinery operates at the atomic level. In 2009 she shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz, becoming the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel, the first woman from the Middle East to win a Nobel in the sciences, and the first woman in 45 years to take the chemistry prize.
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