Structural biologist and x-ray crystallographer Ada Yonath, who won the chemistry Nobel prize in 2009 for her pioneering work on the structure and function of the ribosome, passed away on 31 August at 87 years old. She pursued research and maintained an active laboratory right up until the end of her life and is remembered for her intellectual courage, as well as a willingness to pursue questions that others considered unanswerable.
Yonath’s parents were Jews who emigrated from Poland in 1933 to what is now Israel and she was born in Jerusalem in 1939. Yonath had a curious mind from an early age. In 2018, she recounted to Chemistry World her ambitious project at the age of five to measure the height of the ceiling in her family’s apartment. This involved standing on a table, chair and stool – all balanced on the apartment’s balcony – and she fell into the backyard, breaking her arm.
Yonath’s father, who was a rabbi and ran a grocery store, died when she was just 11 years old. This left her and her mother in dire financial straits, and they moved to Tel Aviv to be near family. After high school, Yonath served two years of mandatory military service in the Israeli army. She went on to earn an undergraduate degree in chemistry from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1962 and then a master’s in biochemistry in 1964.
Her career at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel spanned more than five decades, starting when she arrived there in 1964 to pursue a doctorate in x-ray crystallography. After receiving that PhD four years later, she completed her postdoctoral research in the US at Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Founding Israel’s first protein crystallography lab
Upon returning to Israel in late 1970, Yonath went back to the Weizmann Institute and established the country’s first protein crystallography lab. Over the years, she held various roles at the Weizmann Institute, including heading the Center for Structural Biology from 1988 to 2004. From 1986 to 2004, she led the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter at the German Electron Synchrotron Radiation Facility, alongside her work at Weizmann. Over her career, she published over 200 scientific articles and her work was cited an estimated 16,000 times.
Yonath wrote in her Nobel prize biography that, as the 1970s drew to a close, she had an ‘ambitious plan to shed light on one of the major outstanding questions concerning living cells: the process of protein biosynthesis’. To do this meant determining the three-dimensional structure of the ribosome. This was the start of a ‘quest’ to produce a crystal structure of the ribosome that maps the position of each of its hundreds of thousands of atoms. The path to producing such models was not an easy one as the bacterial ribosome has a molecular weight of 2.3 million Daltons and is made up of over 50 proteins and two lengthy strands of RNA, Yonath noted. She recounted how she faced disbelief or even ridicule from some in the scientific community who didn’t believe it could be done. The resulting structures produced by Yonath and others have improved scientiific understanding of how the ribosome functions and offered new avenues to create antibiotics that target the protein synthesis machinery of bacteria.
‘Ada was an exceptional scientist who never hesitated to choose a path that others considered impossible and to pursue it for decades with determination, curiosity and courage,’ stated the president of the Weizmann Institute, Alon Chen. ‘Her breakthrough in the study of the ribosome transformed our understanding of one of life’s most fundamental processes and opened up new possibilities for combating antibiotic resistance.’
Nevertheless, he said her legacy extends far beyond any scientific achievements. ‘She showed generations of scientists what can be accomplished when one dares to ask big questions and persists in the search for answers,’ Chen added. He noted that Yonath ‘continued to conduct research and publish papers, run an active laboratory and maintain scientific collaborations until the very last days of her life’.
A role model for many
Biochemist and molecular biologist Valerie Mizrahi, who directs the molecular mycobacteriology research unit at University of Cape Town in South Africa and views Yonath is one of her role models, calls her ‘a bold and brilliant scientist’ who showed extraordinary perseverance. ‘By following her instincts, Ada proved her nay-sayers wrong, and in so doing, she achieved a major scientific breakthrough that earned her the Nobel prize in chemistry,’ Mizrahi tells Chemistry World. When Yonath received the chemistry Nobel in 2009 she was the first woman to have won it in 45 years.
During an interview with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s magazine in 2018 she noted that she ‘never felt any gender discrimination’ throughout her scientific career. ‘There are fewer women in science because society doesn’t encourage women to become scientists − even societies that are supposedly open and liberal,’ she stated.
Yonath added that everything generally starts out equal between the sexes at universities when it comes to science, with roughly equal numbers of male and female students, but that changes later. ‘Some girls may be better students, but they often go to work in somebody else’s lab – either because they want less pressure at work, and are therefore less motivated to become principal investigators, or because they prefer to allocate more time to their families,’ she stated.
At the time of the interview, Yonath said she was still working on two things in the lab – developing the next generation of antibiotics and understanding the origins of life.
Yonath often advised young people and early career researchers not to listen to advice. ‘Don’t even ask for advice – do what you think, what is burning inside of you,’ she told science comedian and communicator Brian Malow during a 2017 interview. ‘Focus on what you love to do, what you want to know,’ she continued. ‘Courage is very important, but for science it is not enough; curiosity should come with the courage.’
Beyond the Nobel prize, Yonath won several other major scientific awards. These included the Israel Prize in Chemistry in 2002, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2007, the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize in 2007, the Linus Pauling Gold Medal from Stanford University in 2008, the Albert Einstein World Award in 2008 and the Erice Peace Prize in 2009.
