Ada Yonath: first Israeli woman to win a Nobel

By Ron Bousso (AFP)

JERUSALEM - Ada Yonath, who became the first Israeli woman to win 
a Nobel on Wednesday when she was awarded the Chemistry Prize, 
was once so poor she could not afford books.

The 70-year-old won the prize with two US scientists for "mapping
the ribosome -- one of the cell's most complex machineries -- 
at the atomic level," the Nobel jury said.

It marked just how far she has come since her childhood in a poor
family in Jerusalem in then British-mandate Palestine.

"There was nothing in my childhood to suggest that I would reach
this point, even though my parents and family have always thought
there was a chance of recognition," a weeping Yonath told Israeli
public radio.

She becomes the first Israeli woman to win the prestigious prize
and the fourth woman to ever win the Nobel Chemistry prize,
including Marie Curie, whose story inspired her to pursue science.

Yonath is the ninth Israeli ever to get the Nobel and the third to
win one in chemistry.

Moments after the award was announced in Stockholm, Yonath was
talking to Israeli President Shimon Peres -- himself a Nobel peace
laureate -- who had called to congratulate her.

The award-winning professor from the Weizmann Institute of Science
in the town of Rehovot south of Tel Aviv has devoted her career to
the study of the ribosome, which is crucial in the development of
new antibiotics.

Considered a pioneer of ribosome crystallography, she created the
first ribosome crystals in 1980 and was the first to note that the
ribosome is riddled with internal chambers, according to the US
National Institutes of Health website.

"Our research spun over many years and developed in different
directions... every time I thought I was facing a problem the size
of the Everest only to discover there was a bigger Everest behind
it," she told public radio.

"The second I cracked the structure (of the ribosome) I was very
happy... really, really happy," she said.

Curious from a young age, Yonath was inspired to study science
after reading about Curie.

"All my life there were experiments. It was just plain curiosity.
Once I broke my arm when I fell into the garden trying to measure
the height of our balcony," she told an interviewer in 2008.

"I never thought about me being a woman or not when I did science
-- I was just a human being born into an extremely poor family,"
she once said. "We were so poor we didn't even have books."

She is a strong advocate of encouraging more women to get involved
in science.

"Women make up half the population," she says. "I think the
population is losing half of the human brain power by not
encouraging women to go into the sciences. Women can do great
things if they are encouraged to do so."

"I would like women to have the opportunity to do what is
interesting to them, to go after their curiosity. And I would like
the world to be open to that. I know in many places there is
opposition to that."

Yonath earned her bachelor and master's degrees at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem and her PhD at the Weizmann Institute.

She did post-doctoral stints at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and Carnegie Mellon University.

She has a daughter and lives in Israel.