- Person
- Ada Yonath
- Lived
- 1939–2026
- Field
- Crystallography
- From
- Israeli
The story
Ada Yonath was born Ada Lifshitz in Jerusalem in 1939. Her parents had immigrated to British Mandate Palestine from Zduńska Wola in Poland in 1933. She studied chemistry and biochemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned her doctorate at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1968 with an X-ray study of collagen. After postdoctoral work in Pittsburgh and at MIT, she returned to the Weizmann Institute at the end of 1970 and founded Israel's first biological crystallography laboratory, for almost a decade the only one in the country.
At the end of the 1970s she chose one of the hardest targets in biology: the ribosome, the machinery in every cell that translates the genetic code into proteins. To see how it works, scientists needed its three-dimensional structure, which meant growing crystals of it. But the ribosome is a huge complex of proteins and RNA, unusually flexible and unstable, and lacking internal symmetry. Many experts thought the task impossible, and for more than two decades Yonath met disbelief and even ridicule.
She persevered with a series of inventions. With Heinz-Günter Wittmann at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, she produced the first ribosome microcrystals at the start of the 1980s, using ribosomes from hardy bacteria that live in extreme environments. She developed cryo-bio-crystallography, cooling crystals to about minus 185 degrees Celsius so they survive X-ray bombardment, a technique now routine in structural biology. Scientists at EMBL Hamburg and Grenoble shared the beamlines and diffractometers her work relied on. In 2000 and 2001 her team published the first complete three-dimensional structures of both subunits of the bacterial ribosome.
From 2001 onward she crystallised bacterial ribosomes bound to more than two dozen antibiotics, showing that the drugs lodge in specific pockets at or near the ribosome's working centres and stop bacteria from making proteins. Her group went on to reveal how almost all ribosome-targeting antibiotics act, and how resistance arises.
In 2009 she shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz for showing what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. She was the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first woman from the Middle East to win one in the sciences, and the first woman in 45 years to win the chemistry prize. The Nobel committee noted that the laureates' models of antibiotics bound to the ribosome are used to develop new drugs. Yonath died on 31 August 2026, aged 87.
Why it matters
Yonath's ribosome structures explain how many of the most widely prescribed antibiotics work, and they guide the design of new drugs against resistant bacteria.
About Ada Yonath
Israeli crystallographer who spent two decades solving the structure of the ribosome, revealed how antibiotics work, and became the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel Prize.
More about Ada Yonath
Ada Yonath in the news
Sources
- Ada E. Yonath: Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Professor Ada Yonath (1939–2026) EMBL
- Ada Yonath Wikipedia
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009 NobelPrize.org
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