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Professor Ada Yonath, the Israeli scientist who became the country’s first woman to win the Nobel Prize, has died aged 87.
The pioneering chemist received the award in 2009 for her groundbreaking research into the structure and function of the ribosome – the tiny molecular machine inside cells that reads genetic instructions and uses them to build the proteins essential for life.
Her decades of research helped scientists understand how antibiotics interact with bacteria and contributed to the development of more advanced drugs at a time of growing concern over antibiotic resistance.
Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Yonath grew up in a poor, traditional Jewish family in the city’s Geula neighbourhood. She began working before the age of 12 and later gave mathematics lessons to help pay for her education.
She studied chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before completing a PhD in X-ray crystallography at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1968. After several years of postdoctoral research in the United States, she returned to Israel in the 1970s and established the country’s first protein crystallography laboratory.
Her pursuit of the ribosome was initially regarded by many scientists as almost impossible. She eventually became the first researcher to successfully produce ribosome crystals, laying the foundations for work that culminated in the mapping of its structure.
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“People called me a dreamer,” Yonath recalled in an interview published in 2009 by the Weizmann Institute.
“I wanted to reveal how genetic code is translated into protein,” she added, comparing the scientific challenge to conquering Mount Everest. “It was my dream to contribute something to humanity.”
Yonath and her colleagues made some 25,000 attempts before producing the first ribosome crystals in 1980. Two decades of painstaking research followed before her teams determined the complete three-dimensional structures of the two subunits of a bacterial ribosome.
Yonath shared the 2009 Nobel Prize with American scientist Thomas Steitz and Indian-American scientist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan. She was the first Israeli women to win a Nobel Prize, and the first woman in 45 years to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog described her as one of the leading researchers in Israeli scientific history and a “globally path-breaking woman”.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid said Yonath had demonstrated both that Israeli science could “go the farthest” and that women could break through any glass ceiling.
Yonath, who died on Monday, remained active at the Weizmann Institute until the final years of her life.
She is survived by her daughter, Hagit, and granddaughter, Noa.
Additional reporting by JNS
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