Israeli chemist and biochemist Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.
Credit: AFP
STOCKHOLM: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry on Wednesday for work on the ribosome, a cellular machine that makes proteins, the stuff of life.
Hospital superbugs and other dangerous drug-resistant bacteria are now in the laboratory firing line thanks to their work, the Nobel jury said.
The multi-national trio revealed the structure and function of the ribosome, which translates DNA code to make the thousands of different proteins that build and sustain life at the chemical level.
Saving lives
Their breakthroughs in X-ray crystallography imaging led to 3-D models that now pinpoint the ribosome even at an atomic scale.
The work is already being put to practical use in medical research, "directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity's suffering," the Nobel committee said.
Drug designers use the models in the quest for molecules that can inhibit bacterial ribosomes, seeking to overcome the challenge posed by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and other supergerms.
Some 90,000 patients in the United States die each year as a result of bacterial infection, compared to only about 13,000 20 years ago, and antibiotic resistance is an aggravating factor in most cases.
Ominous scenario
"We seem to be running out of options, and a return to the pitiful health conditions preceding the Second World War has become an ominous scenario," the Nobel jury warned.
The three laureates, who will share the 10 million Swedish kronor (US$1.42 million) prize sum, worked independently of each other yet all published crucial studies in 2000.
For Yonath, 70, just the fourth woman to win the Nobel Chemistry Prize and the first Israeli woman to clinch a Nobel, the distinction marked just how far she has come since her childhood in a poor family in Jerusalem in 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 tearful Yonath told Israeli public radio.
