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October 8, 2009

Three Win Nobel for Ribosome Research

By DENNIS OVERBYE

Three chemists whose work delves into how the 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.

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 proteins in the DNA forms the blueprint for life, ribosomes are the factory floor.
In a news 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.”

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 Harvard in 1966. Dr. Yonath was born in Jerusalem in 1939 and received her Ph.D. at the
Weizmann Institute in 1968.

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