Ada Yonath, Nobel laureate who mapped the ribosome, dies at 87

Ada Yonath, the Weizmann Institute crystallographer who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for revealing the structure of the ribosome, died on 31 August 2026 at the age of 87. She was the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel Prize, and she was still running an active laboratory and collaborating with colleagues until shortly before her death.

The ribosome is the cell's protein factory, a huge molecular machine that reads genetic instructions and assembles proteins in every living thing. In the 1970s, when Yonath set out to determine its atomic structure, many scientists thought the task hopeless: the ribosome was too big, too flexible and too fragile to crystallise. She persisted. Her team produced the first ribosome crystals in 1980, after some 25,000 attempts, and she pioneered the flash-freezing of crystals, now called cryo-crystallography, which protects delicate biological samples from damage by X-rays and became standard practice worldwide.

In 2000 her groups determined the complete three-dimensional structures of both subunits of a bacterial ribosome, and in 2001 they showed exactly where and how a number of clinically important antibiotics bind to it. Because many antibiotics work by jamming bacterial ribosomes, that knowledge has guided efforts to design new drugs against resistant bacteria.

Yonath was born in Jerusalem in 1939 to parents who had emigrated from Poland in 1933, and grew up in poverty. She founded Israel's first protein crystallography laboratory at the Weizmann Institute in 1970 and for nearly two decades also led a Max Planck research unit in Hamburg. She received the Israel Prize, honorary doctorates from dozens of universities and membership in many national academies. Weizmann president Alon Chen said she showed generations of scientists what can be achieved when one dares to ask big questions.