China News Service, October 7 — According to reports from the official Nobel Prize website, the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has just been announced. British scientist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, American scientist Thomas A. Steitz, and Israeli scientist Ada E. Yonath were awarded the prize for their outstanding contributions to studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was born in 1952 and is from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK; Thomas A. Steitz was born in 1940 and is from Yale University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the USA; Ada E. Yonath, a female biologist born in 1939, is from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
The three laureates will share a prize of 10 million Swedish kronor (approximately 1.4 million USD).
Prior to Ada E. Yonath’s win, there were only three female recipients of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and no woman had been on the list since the British biochemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin won the award in 1964.
Biographies:
Israeli Female Biologist Ada E. Yonath
Ada E. Yonath was born in 1939 to a poor family in Jerusalem. Her parents did not have much formal education but did their best to provide her with a good education. After her father passed away, the family moved to Tel Aviv.
Yonath obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and Master’s degree in Biochemistry from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1962 and 1964, respectively. In 1968, she earned her Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, followed by postdoctoral training at Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969 and 1970. She currently holds a position at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
In 2008, Ada E. Yonath received the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award, becoming the first Israeli to receive this honor.
In 2006, Ada E. Yonath and George Feher were awarded the Wolf Prize in Chemistry for their outstanding achievements in the fields of "ribosomal protein synthesis and the light reactions in photosynthesis." The purpose of this prize is to recognize scientists who have made significant contributions to the field of chemistry, excluding Nobel Prize winners. It is one of the most influential awards in the field of chemistry.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is a British structural biologist born in 1952 in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India. He holds American citizenship and obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from Ohio University in 1976. He is currently a senior scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and holds a position at the University of Cambridge. He is one of the winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Thomas A. Steitz
Thomas A. Steitz is an American biochemist born in 1940 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He earned his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from Harvard University in 1966. He is currently the Sterling Professor in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Source: http://news.sina.com.cn/z/2009Nobel/index.shtml
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