Ada Yonath

Ada E. Yonath (Hebrew: עדה יונת‎, pronounced [ˈada joˈnat]) (born 22 June 1939)^[1] is an Israeli crystallographer best known for her pioneering work on the structure of the ribosome. She is the current director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly of the Weizmann Institute of Science. In 2009, she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz for her studies on the structure and function of the ribosome, becoming the first Israeli woman to win the Nobel Prize out of ten Israeli Nobel laureates,^[2] the first woman from the Middle East to win a Nobel prize in the sciences,^[3] and the first woman in 45 years to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. However, she said herself that there was nothing special about a woman winning the Prize.^[4]

Biography

Yonath (née Lifshitz)^[5] was born in the Geula quarter of Jerusalem.^[6] Her parents, Hillel and Esther Lifshitz, were Zionist Jews who immigrated to Palestine from Zduńska Wola, Poland in 1933 before the establishment of Israel.^[7] Her father was a rabbi and came from a rabbinical family. They settled in Jerusalem and ran a grocery, but found it difficult to make ends meet. They lived in cramped quarters with several other families, and Yonath remembers "books" being the only thing she had to keep her occupied.^[8] Despite their poverty, her parents sent her to school in the upscale Beit HaKerem neighborhood to assure her a good education. When her father died at the age of 42, the family moved to Tel Aviv.^[9] Yonath was accepted to Tichon Hadash high school although her mother could not pay the tuition. She gave math lessons to students in return.^[10] As a youngster, she says she was inspired by the Polish and naturalized-French scientist Marie Curie.^[11] However, she stresses that Curie, whom she as a child was fascinated by after reading a well-written biography, was not her "role model".^[12] She returned to Jerusalem for college, graduating from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1962, and a master's degree in biochemistry in 1964. In 1968, she obtained her Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science for X-ray crystallographic studies on the structure of collagen, with Wolfie Traub as her Ph.D. advisor.^[13][14][15]

She has one daughter, Hagit Yonath, a doctor at Sheba Medical Center, and a granddaughter, Noa.^[16] She is the cousin of anti-occupation activist Dr Ruchama Marton.^[17]

She has called for the unconditional release of all Hamas prisoners, saying that "holding Palestinians captive encourages and perpetuates their motivation to harm Israel and its citizens ... once we don't have any prisoners to release they will have no reason to kidnap soldiers".^[18]

Scientific career

Ada Yonath at the Weizmann Institute of Science

Yonath accepted postdoctoral positions at Carnegie Mellon University (1969) and MIT (1970). While a postdoc at MIT she spent some time in the lab of subsequent 1976 chemistry Nobel Prize winner William N. Lipscomb, Jr. of Harvard University where she was inspired to pursue very large structures.^[19]

In 1970, she established what was for nearly a decade the only protein crystallography laboratory in Israel. Then, from 1979 to 1984 she was a group leader with Heinz-Günter Wittmann at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. She was visiting professor at the University of Chicago in 1977-78.^[20] She headed a Max-Planck Institute Research Unit at DESY in Hamburg, Germany (1986–2004) in parallel to her research activities at the Weizmann Institute.

Yonath focuses on the mechanisms underlying protein biosynthesis, by ribosomal crystallography, a research line she pioneered over twenty years ago despite considerable skepticism of the international scientific community.^[21] Ribosomes translate RNA into protein and because they have slightly different structures in microbes, when compared to eukaryotes, such as human cells, they are often a target for antibiotics. In 2000 and 2001, she determined the complete high-resolution structures of both ribosomal subunits and discovered within the otherwise asymmetric ribosome, the universal symmetrical region that provides the framework and navigates the process of polypeptide polymerization. Consequently, she showed that the ribosome is a ribozyme that places its substrates in stereochemistry suitable for peptide bond formation and for substrate-mediated catalysis. In 1993 she visualized the path taken by the nascent proteins, namely the ribosomal tunnel, and recently revealed the dynamics elements enabling its involvement in elongation arrest, gating, intra-cellular regulation and nascent chain trafficking into their folding space.

Additionally, Yonath elucidated the modes of action of over twenty different antibiotics targeting the ribosome, illuminated mechanisms of drug resistance and synergism, deciphered the structural basis for antibiotic selectivity and showed how it plays a key role in clinical usefulness and therapeutic effectiveness, thus paving the way for structure-based drug design.

For enabling ribosomal crystallography Yonath introduced a novel technique, cryo bio-crystallography, which became routine in structural biology and allowed intricate projects otherwise considered formidable.^[22]

At the Weizmann Institute, Yonath is the incumbent of the Martin S. and Helen Kimmel Professorial Chair.

Awards and honors

Telephone interview with Ada Yonath during the announcement of the Nobel Prize

Yonath is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities; the European Academy of Sciences and Art and the European Molecular Biology Organization. On Saturday, 18 October 2014, Professor Yonath was named an ordinary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Francis.^[23]

Her awards and honors include the following:

• In 2002, Harvey Prize
• In 2006, Wolf Prize in Chemistry along with George Feher.
• In 2006, Rothschild Prize in Life Sciences.
• In 2006, The EMET Prize for Art, Science and Culture in Life Sciences, along with Professor Peretz Lavie (Medicine) and Professor Eli Keshet (Biology)
• In 2007, Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize along with Harry Noller
• In 2008, the Albert Einstein World Award of Science for her pioneering contributions to protein biosynthesis in the field of ribosomal crystallography and her introduction of innovative techniques in cryo bio-crystallography.^[24]
• In 2009, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (co-recipient with Thomas Steitz and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan).^[25] She was the first Israeli woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize;^[26]
• She received the Wilhelm Exner Medal in 2010.^[27]

On 27 May 2015 she was awarded Doctor Honoris Causa title of Medical University of Lodz.^[28] In the same year she was awarded the Honorary Doctorate from the De La Salle University, Manila/Philippines, from the Joseph Fourier University, Grenoble/France, the Medical University, Lodz/Poland and from the University of Warwick, UK.^[29]

See also

• History of RNA biology
• List of Israel Prize recipients
• List of female Nobel laureates
• List of Jewish Nobel laureates
• List of RNA biologists

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ada E. Yonath.

• Information and Resources, from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, United States Department of Energy
• "APS user shares the “Israeli Nobel” for chemistry", from the Argonne National Laboratory Advanced Photon Source (APS), United States Department of Energy
• The Official Site of Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize
• Weizmann Institute of Science, Yonath-Site
• Talk of Ada Yonath at the Origins 2011 congress

Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1901–1925 1901 Jacobus van 't Hoff 1902 Emil Fischer 1903 Svante Arrhenius 1904 William Ramsay 1905 Adolf von Baeyer 1906 Henri Moissan 1907 Eduard Buchner 1908 Ernest Rutherford 1909 Wilhelm Ostwald 1910 Otto Wallach 1911 Marie Curie 1912 Victor Grignard / Paul Sabatier 1913 Alfred Werner 1914 Theodore Richards 1915 Richard Willstätter 1916 1917 1918 Fritz Haber 1919 1920 Walther Nernst 1921 Frederick Soddy 1922 Francis Aston 1923 Fritz Pregl 1924 1925 Richard Zsigmondy 1926–1950 1926 Theodor Svedberg 1927 Heinrich Wieland 1928 Adolf Windaus 1929 Arthur Harden / Hans von Euler-Chelpin 1930 Hans Fischer 1931 Carl Bosch / Friedrich Bergius 1932 Irving Langmuir 1933 1934 Harold Urey 1935 Frédéric Joliot-Curie / Irène Joliot-Curie 1936 Peter Debye 1937 Norman Haworth / Paul Karrer 1938 Richard Kuhn 1939 Adolf Butenandt / Leopold Ružička 1940 1941 1942 1943 George de Hevesy 1944 Otto Hahn 1945 Artturi Virtanen 1946 James B. Sumner / John Northrop / Wendell Meredith Stanley 1947 Robert Robinson 1948 Arne Tiselius 1949 William Giauque 1950 Otto Diels / Kurt Alder 1951–1975 1951 Edwin McMillan / Glenn T. Seaborg 1952 Archer Martin / Richard Synge 1953 Hermann Staudinger 1954 Linus Pauling 1955 Vincent du Vigneaud 1956 Cyril Hinshelwood / Nikolay Semyonov 1957 Alexander Todd 1958 Frederick Sanger 1959 Jaroslav Heyrovský 1960 Willard Libby 1961 Melvin Calvin 1962 Max Perutz / John Kendrew 1963 Karl Ziegler / Giulio Natta 1964 Dorothy Hodgkin 1965 Robert Woodward 1966 Robert S. Mulliken 1967 Manfred Eigen / Ronald Norrish / George Porter 1968 Lars Onsager 1969 Derek Barton / Odd Hassel 1970 Luis Federico Leloir 1971 Gerhard Herzberg 1972 Christian B. Anfinsen / Stanford Moore / William Stein 1973 Ernst Otto Fischer / Geoffrey Wilkinson 1974 Paul Flory 1975 John Cornforth / Vladimir Prelog 1976–2000 1976 William Lipscomb 1977 Ilya Prigogine 1978 Peter D. Mitchell 1979 Herbert C. Brown / Georg Wittig 1980 Paul Berg / Walter Gilbert / Frederick Sanger 1981 Kenichi Fukui / Roald Hoffmann 1982 Aaron Klug 1983 Henry Taube 1984 Robert Merrifield 1985 Herbert A. Hauptman / Jerome Karle 1986 Dudley R. Herschbach / Yuan T. Lee / John Polanyi 1987 Donald J. Cram / Jean-Marie Lehn / Charles J. Pedersen 1988 Johann Deisenhofer / Robert Huber / Hartmut Michel 1989 Sidney Altman / Thomas Cech 1990 Elias Corey 1991 Richard R. Ernst 1992 Rudolph A. Marcus 1993 Kary Mullis / Michael Smith 1994 George Olah 1995 Paul J. Crutzen / Mario J. Molina / Frank Rowland 1996 Robert Curl / Harold Kroto / Richard Smalley 1997 Paul D. Boyer / John E. Walker / Jens Christian Skou 1998 Walter Kohn / John Pople 1999 Ahmed Zewail 2000 Alan J. Heeger / Alan MacDiarmid / Hideki Shirakawa 2001–present 2001 William Knowles / Ryoji Noyori / K. Barry Sharpless 2002 John B. Fenn / Koichi Tanaka / Kurt Wüthrich 2003 Peter Agre / Roderick MacKinnon 2004 Aaron Ciechanover / Avram Hershko / Irwin Rose 2005 Robert H. Grubbs / Richard R. Schrock / Yves Chauvin 2006 Roger D. Kornberg 2007 Gerhard Ertl 2008 Osamu Shimomura / Martin Chalfie / Roger Y. Tsien 2009 Venkatraman Ramakrishnan / Thomas A. Steitz / Ada E. Yonath 2010 Richard F. Heck / Akira Suzuki / Ei-ichi Negishi 2011 Dan Shechtman 2012 Robert Lefkowitz / Brian Kobilka 2013 Martin Karplus / Michael Levitt / Arieh Warshel 2014 Eric Betzig / Stefan Hell / William E. Moerner 2015 Tomas Lindahl / Paul L. Modrich / Aziz Sancar