The long road to Nobel Prize

Ada E. Yonath, one of the winners of this year Nobel Prize in Chemistry, had an inspiring career, from the poor starting in a poor family in Jerusalem to the first wave of the scientific world. Currently professor of structural biology and the director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly at the Weizmann Institute, she is the first Israeli woman winner of a Nobel prize. Her work focused on the study of the new ribosome, whose research is having direct consequences in the area of developing new antibiotics. According to an interview published the last year in the Israeli media, she described her early years as: "I was just a human being born into an extremely poor family. We were so poor we didn't even have books". Yonath got her bachelor and MA degree at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the PhD at the Weizmann Institute, with a post-PhD research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University and she is the recipient of various prestigious scientific awards. Declaring herself "happy" and "shockhed" after receiving the news, she outlined, according to the Israeli media: "It's not important who did what but what was done".

Ada E. Yonath, currently living in Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv, is sharing the prize with the American scientists Thomas Stertz and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan.