Israeli scientist becomes 4th female Nobel chemistry prize winner

JERUSALEM, Oct. 7 (Xinhua) -- Israeli scientist Ada E. Yonath was declared on Wednesday as one of the winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry, becoming the fourth woman to be awarded this honor.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Science said in a statement that Yonath, together with Thomas A. Steitz from America's Yale University and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Britain's Cambridge, win the prize for their respective achievements on "the ribosome's translation of DNA information into life."

Israeli scientist and Nobel prize winner Ada Yonath attends a press conference in Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 7, 2009. Yonath and U.S. scientists Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz won on Wednesday the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009 for their respective achievements on "the ribosome's translation of DNA information into life" . Ada Yonath, 70, is the fourth woman to win the Nobel chemistry prize and the first since 1964. (Xinhua)

Describing as "studies of one of life's core processes," the statement said that ribosomes produce proteins, which in turn control the chemistry in all living organisms. As ribosomes are crucial to life, they are also a major target for new antibiotics.

"I'm really, really happy," local daily Ha'aretz quoted Yonath as saying after the announcement, "I thought it was wonderful when the discovery came. It was a series of discoveries. We still don't know every, everything, but we progressed a lot."

Professor Yonath, 70, got her Ph.D. on X-ray crystallography from Weizmann Institute of Israel, now serves as director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly at Weizmann Institute of Science of Israel, and leads a study group on structural biology with the research focused on the structure of the ribosome, said the website of Weizmann Institute of Science.