Ada Yonath. File photo by Miki Koren, Weizmann Institute of Science, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
2009Nobel Prizes
A quest of more than 20 years leads Ada Yonath to the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
She shares the prize with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz.
The story in numbers.
20years
or more spent on the ribosome
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-185 °C
where her team freezes the crystals
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3
laureates share the 2009 chemistry prize
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Here is how it happened.
1939
Ada Yonath is born in Jerusalem in 1939, in a rented flat that three families share.
Her father dies when she is 11, and she takes odd jobs to help her mother.
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End of 1970
She returns to the Weizmann Institute and sets up a laboratory for biological crystallography.
She has studied at the Hebrew University and the Weizmann Institute and done postdoctoral research in the United States.
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End of the 1970s
She sets out to map the ribosome and meets disbelief and even ridicule.
The ribosome is the cell's factory for turning genetic instructions into proteins. The quest takes more than 20 years.
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Start of the 1980s
The first ribosome micro-crystals come from bacteria that live in harsh places.
At the Weizmann Institute and the Max Planck Institute in Germany, she uses ribosomes from hardy bacteria of the Dead Sea and thermal springs. Her team also learns to cool crystals to -185 °C so the X-rays damage them less.
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2000 and 2001
Her team publishes complete three-dimensional structures of both ribosome subunits.
It then crystallises ribosomes with more than two dozen antibiotics. The drugs bind in specific pockets that can block the ribosome's work.
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Ada Yonath at the 2009 Nobel Prize press conference in Stockholm. File photo by Prolineserver, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
2009
Yonath, Ramakrishnan and Steitz share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Each laureate receives one third of the prize, awarded “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”.
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More pictures from this story.
Ada Yonath lecturing on the structure of the ribosome at EPFL, 2019. File photo by Alain Herzog, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Ada Yonath lecturing on the structure of the ribosome at EPFL, 2019 
Ada Yonath at a press conference in Brazil, 2011. File photo by Renato Araújo / ABr, CC BY 3.0 br, via Wikimedia Commons.
Ada Yonath at a press conference in Brazil, 2011
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Here is why it matters.
Many antibiotics work by blocking the ribosome, and her structures show where the drugs bind. Those findings may help improve existing antibiotics or design new ones.
Three more milestones to read next.
Dan Shechtman. File photo by Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
2011
Technion's Dan Shechtman wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Read the story
Aaron Ciechanover. File photo by Bengt Oberger, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
2004
Technion's Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Read the story
Arieh Warshel in December 2013. File photo by Bengt Nyman, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
2013
Kibbutz-born Arieh Warshel and Michael Levitt win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Read the story
Where each fact was read.
Sources read on 1 November 2026.