Netanyahu tells Israeli Nobel laureaute: You've made our nation proud  
 
By Haaretz Service  
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1119429.html
 

Israeli scientist Ada Yonath, a leading researcher in the structural 
biology field, was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday, 
the Nobel committee in Stockholm announced. Yonath shares the prize 
with Britain's Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz, 
an American, for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Yonath to congratulate her 
and expressed his "enormous pride, along with the entire nation" 
for her achievement. 

"The Nobel Prize is a true Olympics of humanity," said Netanyahu. 
"It is an enormous achievement." 
 
Yonath has focused her research on the structure of the ribosome, 
a part of the cell that synthesizes protein and translates genetic 
code in the production of protein. 

Yonath was the first Israeli biologist to work with NASA in sending 
research material to outer space. She cooperated with NASA on 
12 missions. Her research contributed greatly to the development of 
more effective antibiotics, which can overcome phenomenon of drug 
resistant pathogens. 

Yonath is the fourth woman to win the Nobel chemistry prize and the 
first since 1964, when Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin of Britain received 
the prize. 

"I'm really, really happy," Yonath said after being informed of her 
victory. "I thought it was wonderful when the discovery came. 
It was a series of discoveries...We still don't know every, everything, 
but we progressed a lot." 

Yonath told reporters that from the very beginning her project seemed 
to her Nobel-worthy, but that along the way many had been wary of her 
ability to see the research through." 

"I must say I was shocked when they called me and said I was in the 
leading group. I was sure they were pulling my leg, so I said: 
'here, they found themselves a new victim,'" said Yonath. 

"I saw the number 46 on the caller ID, the country code for Sweden. 
So I said, 'they're taking this joke really far,' but the tone was 
very much Swedish, with a very Swedish accent, so it seemed fine after all." 

"From the first indication that perhaps this project would work, I was 
told that this was a project of Nobel standards." At another point, 
however, she was told that her project would not succeed. 

"You won't make it, what you want to do others have tried and failed, 
so it won't happen. They gave me the impression that the problems were 
cardinal, that there was no chance." 

Yonath is a professor and head researcher in the field of structural 
biology and biochemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. 

She has won many prizes for her research in recent years, including the 
Israel Prize in Chemistry and the Wolf Prize in Chemistry. 

This year's three laureates all generated three-dimensional models that 
show how different antibiotics bind to ribosomes. 

"These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new 
antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing 
humanity's suffering," the academy said in its announcement. 
"All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map 
the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of 
atoms that make up the ribosome," the academy said. 

Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, established 
the Nobel Prizes in his will in 1895. The first awards were handed out 
six years later. 

Each prize comes with a 10 million kronor [$1.4 million] purse, a diploma, 
a gold medal and an invitation to the prize ceremony in Stockholm on 
Dec. 10. The Peace Prize is handed out in Oslo. 

Israeli physicist Yakir Aharonov lost the Nobel Prize for physics, 
despite predictions that he was likely to win. The committee awarded the 
the physics prize to engineers who developed the mechanism used in 
digital photography, preferring to award the prize to practical 
technology that could be used on a daily basis rather than the 
theoretical physics which Aharonov focused on. 

The last Israeli to receive a Nobel Prize was Yisrael Robert Aumann, 
who was awarded the prize in economics in 2005 for his work on conflict 
and cooperation through game-theory analysis. He shared the prize with 
Thomas Schelling.