Three Win Nobel for Ribosome Research

The trio are Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England; Thomas A. Steitz of Yale University; and Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Each scientist will get a third of the prize, worth 10 million Swedish kronors in total, or $1.4 million, in a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

If the sequence of lettered nucleic acids in the DNA forms the blueprint for life, ribosomes are the factory floor. In a press release, the Swedish academy said the three, who worked independently, were being honored “for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level.”

Three researchers whose work delves into how information encoded on strands of DNA is translated by the chemical complexes known as ribosomes into the thousands of proteins that make up living matter will share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Swedish Academy of Sciences said Wednesday.

Some antibiotics work by gumming up the ribosomes of bacteria, allowing those bacteria to be stopped at no danger to their host. The ribosome research, the academy said, is being used to develop new antibiotics.

Dr. Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India, in 1952 and obtained his Ph.D. at Ohio University, and holds American citizenship. Dr. Steitz was born in Milwaukee in 1940 and received his Ph.D. from

One of the first people who called to congratulate her was the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, who shared a Nobel Prize for Peace with the late leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat in 1994.

She is the fourth woman to win the chemistry prize and the first one since 1964, noted Thomas Lane, president of the American Chemical Society, who said it reflected “a tremendous change in the demographics of the field.” More than 50 percent of chemistry degrees are now earned by women, he reported.

Dr. Yonath was born in Jerusalem in 1939 and received her Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute in 1968. She said on Wednesday that she was both surprised and not surprised at being awarded a Nobel Prize. Speaking by telephone, she said people had long been telling her that her project was a potential winner. But at the same time, she said, there were “many, many people with fantastic work standing in line.”

She said she was working and watching over her 13-year-old granddaughter when she received the news.