Ada Yonath
Ada Yonath
Ada E. Yonath is an Israeli crystallographer best known for her pioneering work on the structure of the ribosome. She is the current director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly of the Weizmann Institute of Science. In 2009, she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz for her studies on the structure and function of the ribosome, becoming the first Israeli woman to win the Nobel...
NationalityIsraeli
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth22 June 1939
CityGeula, Israel
CountryIsrael
I don't distinguish between men and women. This is irrelevant to me, and I don't think in these terms.
I was born in Jerusalem in 1939 to a poor family that shared a rented four-room apartment with two additional families and their children.
I was born in Jerusalem with a religious background and a rabbi as a father... it was rather poor, but what we did have, we did have books.
If one has curiosity, then one stands the chance of attain a high level of scientific inquiry.
My neighborhood didn't really encourage women, though it didn't prevent women from progressing, either.
Proteins are constantly being degraded. Therefore, simultaneous production of proteins is required.
The ribosome is a machine that gets instructions from the genetic code and operates chemically in order to produce the product.
The Weizmann Institute showed me respect and didn't require many administrative tasks, so I was quite independent. I did what I wanted.
When a man sits in our jails for a number of years, and around him friends and family become angry, that is how we create terrorists.
Words originating from the verb 'to die' were frequently used when I described my initial plans to determine the ribosome structure.
After I spent my compulsory army service in the 'top secret office' of the Medical Forces, where I was fortunate to be exposed to clinical and medical issues, I enrolled to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Anyone who sits in our jails who is not just a criminal but what we call a terrorist, with or without blood on his hands - and these definitions are also unclear to me - should not be sitting in our custody.
At the end of the 1970s, I was a young researcher at the Weizmann Institute with an ambitious plan to shed light on one of the major outstanding questions concerning living cells: the process of protein biosynthesis.
DNA is a code of four letters; proteins are made up of amino acids which come in 20 forms. So the ribosome is a very clever machine that reads one language and operates in another.