Ada yonath

Ada Yonath was born in 1939 in the Geula quarter of Jerusalem. Yonath remembers "books" being the only thing she had to keep her occupied. In spite of their poverty, her parents sent her to schoolin the upscale Beit Hakerem neighborhood to assure her a good education. When her father died the family moved to another city and Ada was accepted to Tichon Hadash high school although her mothercould not pay the tuition. She returned to Jerusalem for college, graduating from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1962, and a master's degreein biochemistry in 1964. In 1968, she earned a Ph.D. inX-Ray crystallography at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

After all that years of education Ada went to United States for postdoctoral positions atthe Carnegie Mellon University in1969, and MIT in1970. While doing this she spent some time in the lab of the winner of Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1976, so she got inspired. In 1970, she started traveling toGermany and Israel and established what was for nearly a decade the only protein crystallography laboratory in Israel. Then, from 1979 to 1984 she was a group leader of the Max Planck Institute forMolecular Genetics in Berlin. She was visiting professor at theUniversity of Chicago in 1977-78. Yonath passed great part of her life in United States where she dedicated to protein genes and speciallybacteria. She focused a lot in investigating antibiotics with the help of Ribosomes. She analyze cells and discovered many things about DNA, RNA and microbres. Also discovered how bacteria get inmune toantibiotics. Additionally, Yonath clear up the modes of action of over twenty different antibiotics targeting the ribosome, illuminated mechanisms of drug resistance and synergism, deciphered thestructural basis for antibiotic selectivity and showed how it plays a key role in clinical usefulness and therapeutic effectiveness. Yonath won many prizes in all her life:
* In 2000, the first...