Prof. Ada Yonath, an Israeli Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry and one of the country's most internationally recognized scientists, died Monday. Born in Jerusalem in 1939, Yonath devoted decades to studying the ribosome, the cellular machinery responsible for protein synthesis, and received global recognition in 2009 when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Yonath grew up in Jerusalem's Geula neighborhood in a family of modest means. Her father, Hillel, was a rabbi who ran a grocery store with her mother, Esther. After losing her father at age 11, she moved with her mother and sister to Tel Aviv. She completed her high school education at Tichon Hadash while working to help support her family.
Following military service, Yonath enrolled at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry and a master's degree in biochemistry and biophysics. She later moved to the Weizmann Institute of Science to complete her doctoral work. After postdoctoral research in the United States, she returned to Israel and joined the Weizmann Institute faculty in 1970.
Her scientific fame stemmed from pioneering research that decoded the three-dimensional structure of the ribosome, the cellular component responsible for producing proteins. Yonath began working in this field in the 1970s, when attempting to decipher the ribosome's structure was considered extraordinarily difficult, and her early results were met with skepticism.
For years, Yonath persisted in her research, developing and employing methods that overcame the challenges of studying the ribosome. Her work contributed to understanding how it functions and provided better insight into how antibiotic drugs work.
The greatest recognition of her work came in 2009, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her ribosome research. She shared the prize with scientists Thomas Steitz and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan.
Beyond the Nobel Prize, Yonath received numerous honors throughout her career both in Israel and internationally, including the Israel Prize, the Wolf Prize, the EMET Prize, the Rothschild Prize, and the Harvey Prize. She became one of the most distinguished and decorated figures in Israeli science.
