Israeli Nobel winner Ada Yonath: Shocked but happy

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After the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, Israeli scientist Ada Yonath said she was very surprised, but felt happy and thankful to be honored.

The 70 year-old scientist is the fourth woman to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry. She says women can do as well as men in science.

Ada Yonath says that she and the other two winners are competitors who often meet and talk at conferences.

Ada Yonath said, "Many people say that the wheels of science is competition, and I think, if I am allowed to say a philosophical sentence about science, it's not so important who did what, but what was done, and what the world gets out of this work."

Israeli President Shimon Peres congratulated the first woman in his country to win such a prize. Peres himself is a past winner of the Nobel peace prize.

Shimon Peres, Israeli President, said, "I want to congratulate Ada Yonath from the bottom of my heart for receiving the Nobel prize chemistry. First of all, she deserves it. Secondly, she feels that human existence is pretty much a chemical matter."

Yonath was born in Jerusalem in 1939. She's now a professor of structural biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Yonath has spent most of her career working to expose the structure of the ribosome. She's regarded as a pioneer and leading researcher in this field. She's already received many prizes for her achievements, including the "Albert Einstein World Award of Science" from America's Princeton University and the "UNESCO-L'Oreal Award" in 2008, as well as Israel's "Wolf Prize" in 2007.