Israeli Nobel Prize
It was announced Wednesday that Professor Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot has won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, sharing it with two other colleagues, V. Ramakrishnan (MRC, Cambridge) and Thomas Steitz (MIT, Boston). They all worked on the X-ray crystallography of the ribosome.
It should be emphasized that Ada Yonath did extremely difficult pioneering work over a period of 40 years in order achieve this distinction. I met Ada when I was a graduate student at the Weizmann Institute, and I chose to work on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy while she chose crystallography. One major difference between these physico-chemical tools is that NMR is done in solution (generally) and crystallography in the solid state using crystals.
I also met Ada when I was at the Weizmann Insitute for a sabbatical in 1976-7, and I remember that then she had a research group and she invited me to attend one of her group research seminars. This was held on the beach at Palmahim, about 20 mins drive from Rehovot, with the students sitting around in a circle on the sand describing their research progress. I found this mildly disconcerting, especially when everyone stripped off to their bathing suits and then ran into the sea. Since the topics and style were far from my own I didn't attend again.
What Ada was doing was thought at the time to be impossible, namely to obtain crystals of ribosomal components and then to solve their structures. With NMR, we were able to study small proteins that had hundreds of atoms, but the ribsosomal complexes had hundreds of thousands of atoms, and it was thought impossible to both crystallize them, and if you could do that, then to solve their structures. Ada took a great chance to base her whole career on solving the structure of this macromolecular complex of many proteins and two RNA molecules on which the process of protein biosynthesis occurs in the cell.
How this happened in detail was a mystery. Many scientists showed that the process involved the synthesis of messenger RNA (mRNA, quite different from ribosomal RNA) from DNA, that contains the genetic code for a specific gene, and the transfer of that mRNA with its genetic information from the nucleus to the cytoplasm, where it complexed with the ribosome and with other components containing amino acids, and synthesized specific proteins.
The work Ada and her colleagues did not only clarified these processes, but also showed where certain antibiotics bind to bacterial ribosomes to exert their pharmacological effects by disrupting this process. This work clearly has medical applications. Altogether a well deserved honor for a tremendous accomplishment. This brings to 9 the number of Nobel Prizes that tiny Israel has achieved.
It should be emphasized that Ada Yonath did extremely difficult pioneering work over a period of 40 years in order achieve this distinction. I met Ada when I was a graduate student at the Weizmann Institute, and I chose to work on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy while she chose crystallography. One major difference between these physico-chemical tools is that NMR is done in solution (generally) and crystallography in the solid state using crystals.
I also met Ada when I was at the Weizmann Insitute for a sabbatical in 1976-7, and I remember that then she had a research group and she invited me to attend one of her group research seminars. This was held on the beach at Palmahim, about 20 mins drive from Rehovot, with the students sitting around in a circle on the sand describing their research progress. I found this mildly disconcerting, especially when everyone stripped off to their bathing suits and then ran into the sea. Since the topics and style were far from my own I didn't attend again.
What Ada was doing was thought at the time to be impossible, namely to obtain crystals of ribosomal components and then to solve their structures. With NMR, we were able to study small proteins that had hundreds of atoms, but the ribsosomal complexes had hundreds of thousands of atoms, and it was thought impossible to both crystallize them, and if you could do that, then to solve their structures. Ada took a great chance to base her whole career on solving the structure of this macromolecular complex of many proteins and two RNA molecules on which the process of protein biosynthesis occurs in the cell.
How this happened in detail was a mystery. Many scientists showed that the process involved the synthesis of messenger RNA (mRNA, quite different from ribosomal RNA) from DNA, that contains the genetic code for a specific gene, and the transfer of that mRNA with its genetic information from the nucleus to the cytoplasm, where it complexed with the ribosome and with other components containing amino acids, and synthesized specific proteins.
The work Ada and her colleagues did not only clarified these processes, but also showed where certain antibiotics bind to bacterial ribosomes to exert their pharmacological effects by disrupting this process. This work clearly has medical applications. Altogether a well deserved honor for a tremendous accomplishment. This brings to 9 the number of Nobel Prizes that tiny Israel has achieved.
posted by Jack Cohen at 9:48 AM
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