WORLD! EAT YOUR HEART OUT !!!

Israeli woman wins 2009 chemistry Nobel

Ada Yonath is one of three Nobel Prize winners for achievements in chemistry

Reuters

Published:

10.07.09, 12:10 / Israel News

Two Americans and an Israeli shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry for showing how ribosomes function, work that has important implications for antibiotics, the prize committee said on Wednesday.

The prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million) recognised Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath for showing how the ribosome, which produces protein, functions at the atomic level.

"As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics," the Nobel Committee for Chemistry at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

A renowned scientist, Yonath serves as the director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

She was a co-recipient of the 2006 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, along George Feher, and in 2008, became the first Israeli to win a lifetime's achievement award from L'Oréal and UNESCO for her vital work identifying how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics.

Following the announcement, President Shimon Peres called professor Yonath and congratulated her on the win. "We are so proud of you, it's hard to describe just how much. You are extremely deserving of the Nobel and the award is an achievement to the entire country, we are all excited together with you," Peres told the professor.

"She is very excited. We are getting millions of phone calls. We are very very proud," said Yonath's daughter Dr. Hagit Yonath.

Dr. Anat Bashan, Yonath's research partner also commented and said, "No doubt that if anyone deserves a Nobel prize it's Ada – she's an amazing scientist and an incredible human being."

This was the third of this year's Nobel prizes, following awards for medicine or physiology on Monday and for physics on Tuesday.

Prizes for the sciences and for peace were established in the will of 19th century dynamite tycoon Alfred Nobel and have been handed out since 1901. Sweden's central bank began awarding a prize for economics in 1969.

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