"Women can do great things": Israeli Nobel laureate

JERUSALEM, Oct. 7 (Xinhua) -- Israeli scientist Ada E. Yonath, the fourth woman who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry, said on Wednesday that women can do as well as men in science.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Science said in a statement on Wednesday 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, won the prize for their respective achievements on "the ribosome's translation of DNA information into life."

Yonath said after the announcement that she was very surprised about her winning the prize.

"I was shocked when they called me and said I was in the leading group," Yonath said, adding that when she saw the caller's number was from Sweden "I said, they're taking this joke really far."

She told a press conference held in Weizmann Institute of Science of Israel on Wednesday afternoon that she had thought there was no chance for her to win.

In her 70, Yonath now serves as director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assemblyat Weizmann Institute of Science, and leads a study group on structural biology with the research focused on the structure of the ribosome, according to the website of Weizmann Institute of Science.

Describing as "studies of one of life's core processes," the statement of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science 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.

Yonath now is regarded as a pioneer and leading researcher on ribosome crystallography, and she has won many honors for her achievements including "Albert Einstein World Award of science" from America's Princeton University in 2008, the "UNESCO-L'Oreal Award" issued in Paris in 2008 and the "Wolf Prize" of Israel in 2007.

She was also the first Israeli biologist to work with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in sending research material to outer space and cooperate with NASA on 12 missions, according to local daily Ha'aretz.

Her research contributed greatly to the development of more effective antibiotics, which can overcome phenomenon of drug resistant pathogens, according to Ha'aretz.

The latest victory of female scientist on Nobel chemistry prize has to date back to 1964. In the century-old history of Nobel Prize, only around 5 percent of the winners are female.

Yonath has said before that her role model, when she was growing up, was female scientist Marie Curie, who is the first person honored with two Nobel Prizes.

"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," Yonath told Israeli scientific and cultural news service ISRAEL21c in an interview before.

Yonath was born in Jerusalem. Although her parents had little education, they recognized their daughter's talent and ensured that she went to the best schools. "We were so poor, we didn't even have books," said Yonath.

Yonath got her degrees of Bachelor of Science on Chemistry and Master of Science on Biochemistry from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and then achieved Ph.D. on X-ray crystallography from Weizmann Institute.

She said, it was a common idea in the past that women were not good at math or science and could not be good scientists because of the time and dedication the profession requires, but women can do great things.

"Women make up half of the population," she told ISRAEL21c, "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."