Ada Yonath

Origins and early life

Ada Esther Lifshitz was born in the Geula quarter of Jerusalem on 22 June 1939 to Hillel and Esther Lifshitz, Zionist Jews who had come from Zduńska Wola in Poland in 1933, before the state existed.

Work and career

Her father was a rabbi from a rabbinical family; the couple kept a grocery, shared a small flat and struggled, and yet sent her across the city to school in Beit HaKerem so that she would be well taught. Her father died at forty-two, the family moved to Tel Aviv, and she helped her mother keep them. She spent her whole career at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, and set herself a problem the field considered hopeless.

The ribosome is the machine that reads genetic instructions and builds proteins from them, a quarter of a million atoms, and to see it one has to crystallise it — and nobody believed a structure that large and that mobile could be made to sit still in a crystal. Yonath began in 1980, worked for two decades against near-universal scepticism, borrowed a trick from hibernating bears whose ribosomes pack into ordered arrays, learned to freeze her crystals at near absolute zero so the X-ray beam would not destroy them first, and finally mapped the thing atom by atom.

The maps showed exactly how several antibiotics jam the machine, and how bacteria become resistant. She shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz, the first Israeli woman to receive a Nobel Prize, and died on 31 August 2026.