For years, the crystallographer and biochemist Ada Yonath had to contend with the disdain and sometimes derision of many of her contemporaries after she set herself the challenge of mapping the molecular structure of the ribosome.
Ribosomes are found in all living cells. Effectively they are tiny factories that synthesise proteins, complex molecules that are vital for building and repairing the tissues and organs of animals and plants. Many scientists believed hers was a fruitless endeavour because ribosomes are so small – sometimes only 20 nanometres in diameter – irregular in shape and lacking internal symmetry. James Watson, one of the Nobel prizewinning discoverers of the double-helix structure of DNA, had tried and failed. But Yonath, who has died aged 87, proved her doubters wrong, and was rewarded with the 2009 Nobel prize in chemistry, only the fourth woman to receive it, which she shared with the biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and biochemist Thomas Steitz.
