A balcony in Geula
Ada Esther Lifshitz was born on June 22, 1939, in the Geula quarter of Jerusalem. Her parents, Hillel and Esther Lifshitz, were Zionists who had emigrated in 1933 from Zduńska Wola in Poland to British Mandate Palestine. Her father was a rabbi from a rabbinical family; in Jerusalem the couple ran a small grocery store and struggled to make ends meet. They shared a four-room apartment with two other families, one kitchen, one bathroom, and the balcony was the only space the little girl could call her own.
It was there that she conducted what she later called her first experiment. At about five, she wanted to know the distance from the floor to the ceiling, so she stacked a table, a chair and a stool and climbed up. She fell to the yard below and was badly injured, she recalled many fractures and three months in a cast. Decades later she was allowed to revisit the apartment, only to find that the tenants had remodelled; she joked that she never got her result. Despite their poverty, her parents sent her to school in the more prosperous Beit HaKerem neighbourhood so that she would have the best education they could find.
Earning an education
Her father died at forty-two, and the family moved to Tel Aviv, where Ada helped her mother by babysitting and tutoring. Accepted to the Tichon Hadash high school but unable to pay its fees, she taught mathematics to other pupils in exchange for her tuition. As a girl she read a biography of Marie Curie and was fascinated by it, though she later insisted that Curie was an inspiration rather than a role model.
She returned to Jerusalem for university, earning a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the Hebrew University in 1962 and a master’s in biochemistry in 1964. In 1968 she completed her doctorate at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, using X-ray crystallography to study the structure of collagen under Wolfie Traub. Postdoctoral years followed at Carnegie Mellon University and at MIT; time spent in the Harvard laboratory of William Lipscomb, who would win the 1976 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, inspired her to take on very large molecular structures.
Choosing the impossible problem
Back in Israel, in 1970 she founded what was for nearly a decade the country’s only protein crystallography laboratory. By the late 1970s she had settled on the target that would define her life: the ribosome. Every living cell contains thousands of these molecular machines, which read the genetic instructions carried by messenger RNA and string amino acids together into proteins. The ribosome is enormous by molecular standards, made of dozens of proteins and long strands of RNA, and it is flexible and fragile. To determine its atomic structure with X-rays, it first had to be coaxed into forming orderly crystals, something most experts believed could not be done.
Yonath pursued it anyway, and faced years of scepticism from the international scientific community. From 1979 to 1984 she led a group with Heinz-Günter Wittmann at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, and from 1986 to 2004 she headed a Max Planck research unit at the DESY synchrotron centre in Hamburg while continuing her work at the Weizmann Institute. In 1980, after some 25,000 attempts, her team produced the first ribosome crystals. Her strategy was to use ribosomes from hardy microbes that thrive in extreme environments, whose molecular machinery is unusually robust.
Freezing the machine
Even with crystals in hand, a second obstacle remained: ribosome crystals were destroyed by the very X-rays used to study them. Yonath’s answer was to cool them to extremely low temperatures, around minus 185 degrees Celsius, so that they could survive exposure long enough to yield data. She later traced part of her inspiration to reports that the ribosomes of hibernating polar bears pack themselves into orderly arrays, a hint that nature itself could arrange these machines in regular form.
The technique she pioneered, cryo bio-crystallography, became a routine method throughout structural biology, allowing many other difficult molecules to be solved. Her own progress was steady rather than sudden. In 1993 she visualised the tunnel through which newly made proteins leave the ribosome. In 2000 and 2001 her group determined complete high-resolution structures of both ribosomal subunits, and she showed that the ribosome is a ribozyme, an RNA-based machine in which a symmetrical core positions its building blocks precisely to form the chemical bonds of a protein.
A Nobel Prize, and a first
In 2009 Yonath shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.” She became the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first woman from the Middle East to win a Nobel in the sciences, and the first woman to win the chemistry prize since Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in 1964, forty-five years earlier.
The recognition capped a long list of honours, including the Israel Prize in 2002, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2006 and the L’Oréal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science in 2008. She was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, named to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Francis in 2014 and elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2020. Asked about being a woman in science, she once remarked that she was simply a scientist, not male or female.
At the Weizmann Institute she directed the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly and held the Martin S. and Helen Kimmel Professorial Chair. Among her other awards were the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 2005, the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize in 2007, the Albert Einstein World Award of Science in 2008 for her pioneering ribosomal crystallography and cryo bio-crystallography, and the Wilhelm Exner Medal in 2010. After the Nobel she became a sought-after speaker at universities and science congresses from India to Ecuador, where she often spoke to students and young researchers.
Why it matters: antibiotics
Yonath’s work had immediate practical consequences. Bacterial ribosomes differ slightly from human ones, and many of the most important antibiotics work by jamming the bacterial ribosome while leaving our own alone. By determining how more than twenty different antibiotics bind to the ribosome, Yonath and her colleagues showed precisely how these drugs stop bacteria from making proteins, why they are selective, how some combinations work together, and how bacteria evolve resistance.
That knowledge opened the way to structure-based drug design, engineering new antibiotics atom by atom to evade resistance, at a time when drug-resistant infections were becoming one of medicine’s gravest threats. UNESCO described her research as key to understanding how antibiotics work, and obituaries noted that her mapping of the ribosome directly informed new antibiotic designs.
Israeli and Jewish roots
Yonath’s story is entwined with that of the Jewish state. Her parents were Polish Jewish pioneers who left Europe six years before the Holocaust destroyed the world they came from; she was born in Jerusalem under the British Mandate, grew up through Israel’s founding and its hard early years, and built her entire career around the Weizmann Institute, Israel’s premier research centre. Her achievement was celebrated in Israel as a national milestone, and President Isaac Herzog later called her one of the leading researchers in the history of Israeli science.
She was also a familiar figure abroad, lecturing widely in Europe, Asia and Latin America and receiving honorary doctorates from universities including the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and the Medical University of Łódź, the latter not far from Zduńska Wola, the Polish town her parents had left.
Her standing was reflected in the academies that elected her: besides the US National Academy of Sciences, she was a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Molecular Biology Organization and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
Family and character
Yonath married Moshe Yonath; the marriage ended in divorce. Their daughter, Hagit Yonath, became a physician at Sheba Medical Center, and Yonath spoke often of her granddaughter, Noa. She was a cousin of the Israeli psychiatrist and activist Ruchama Marton, whose mother was her mother’s sister.
With her halo of curly hair and her plain-spoken manner, she became one of the most recognisable scientists in Israel, a symbol of persistence for a generation of young researchers. The head of EMBL Hamburg, whose beamlines she used for years, called her “a legend.”
Last years and legacy
Yonath never really retired. As an Institute Professor at the Weizmann Institute, its highest academic rank, she continued to run an active laboratory, to publish and to lecture into her late eighties. She died on August 31, 2026, at the age of eighty-seven. Weizmann Institute president Alon Chen remembered her as “an extraordinary scientist who was not afraid to choose a path that others thought impossible.”
Her legacy is twofold. Scientifically, she helped reveal the inner workings of one of life’s most fundamental machines and gave biologists a technique that changed how molecules are studied. Personally, the grocer’s daughter from Geula who fell off a balcony trying to measure a ceiling became proof that patience, curiosity and sheer persistence can crack problems the experts have written off.
Sources & further reading
Ada Yonath, Wikipedia · Ada E. Yonath, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Ada Yonath on childhood science, cat hotels and the price of fame, Chemistry World · Israeli Nobel laureate Ada Yonath, pioneering ribosome researcher, dies at 87, Ynetnews · Professor Ada Yonath (1939–2026), EMBL · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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