- Ada Yonath, Winner of 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

On October 7, 2009, the winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry were announced in Stockholm, Sweden. Ada Yonath, Israeli crystallographer, best known for her pioneering work on the structure and function of ribosome, was awarded this honor, along with American physicist and molecular biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and American biophysicist and biochemist Thomas Steitz. Ada Yonath therefore is the only female winner of this prize for nearly half a century since 1964. She is also the only woman in Israel, the Middle East and even Asia to have been awarded this honor so far.

Ada Yonath revealed that her research experience was influenced by another great female scientist, and she herself is called “Madame Curie of Israel”.

Ada Yonath’s parents were Polish Jews who immigrated to British Palestine in 1933 and Yonah was born in Jerusalem in 1939. Despite poverty, the parents still attached great importance to her education. As she couldn’t pay the tuition, Yonath taught junior students as substitute maths teacher in middle school to earn her tuition. In 1962, Yonath graduated from the Department of Chemistry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a prestigious Israeli university, and received a master’s degree in biochemistry two years later. In 1968, at the age of 29, Yonath received her Ph.D. at the Witzman Institute of Science, specializing in X-ray crystallography. After that, she successively conducted post-doctoral researches at Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1970, Ada Yonath returned to Israel and contributed to the establishment of Israel’s first protein crystallography laboratory, and has since focused on the research of ribosome crystallization. Before she made breakthroughs after decades of researches as difficult as climbing the Everest over and over again, almost no one had believed that ribosomes could crystallize. Yonath conducted tens of thousands of experiments, during which time she was called daydreamer by the international science community countless times, but she herself said that she didn’t care. “As long as the experiment can continue, I’ll not be distracted.” In the end, truth was on Yonath’s side.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Ada Yonath has successively won Israel Award, Israeli Wolf Prize in Chemistry, Israeli Rothschild Prize in Life Sciences, German Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, Austrian Wilhelm Exner Medal, the Marie Curie Medal awarded by the Polish Chemical Society, and the Albert Einstein World Award of Science, etc. Besides, she is also a research member of several major scientific research institutions such as the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Israel Academy of Humanities and Sciences, and the European Academy of Arts and Sciences and she also served as the president of the Max Planck Society in Hamburg, Germany from 1986 to 2004.

Ada Yonath was awarded Honorary Doctorates from many prestigious universities, including Carnegie Mellon University; the University of Warwick, UK; the Medical University of Lodz, Poland; the Joseph Fourier University, Grenoble, France. In 2019, Ada Yonath was employed as the Honorary Professor by Northwest University, China.