Articles of September 2009

Every year, Nobel Prize is awarded to a person who has done something for a noble cause. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for work on the ribosome, a cellular machine that makes proteins, the stuff of life. The trio will share the 1.42 million dollars prize sum against their works done independently of each other yet all published crucial studies in 2000.

Yonath, 70, is the fourth woman to win the Nobel Chemistry Prize and the first Israeli woman to clinch a Nobel. Indian-born Ramakrishnan is a senior scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, Britain who received his PhD in physics from Ohio University in the United States. Steitz is a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University in the United States.

Thanks to their work, hospital superbugs and other dangerous drug-resistant bacteria are now in the laboratory firing line, the Nobel jury said. Their research 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. The breakthroughs in X-ray crystallography imaging led to 3D models that now pinpoint the ribosome even at an atomic