Ada Yonath was an Israeli crystallographer, chemist, and Nobel laureate. Yonath was born into a low-income family in Jerusalem’s Geula neighborhood. After her father died when she was young, she began working before the age of 12. Her family later moved to Tel Aviv, where she tutored other students in mathematics to help pay her tuition at Tichon Hadash. Yonath received her B.Sc. in chemistry in 1962 and M.Sc. in biochemistry in 1964 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. After completing her Ph.D. in X-ray crystallography at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1968, she conducted postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1970, Yonath joined the Chemistry Department of the Weizmann Institute and established Israel’s first protein-crystallography laboratory, which remained the country’s only such facility for nearly a decade. She became the first scientist to produce ribosome crystals successfully. In 1984, she was promoted to associate professor, and in 1988 she became a full professor. She headed the Structural Chemistry Department from 1989 to 1990 and the Structural Biology Department from 1992 to 1994. She also served as director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly and the Joseph and Ceil Mazer Center for Structural Biology. She became the Martin S. Kimmel Professor of Structural Biology. Between 1986 and 2004, while remaining on the Weizmann faculty, she headed the Max Planck Research Units for Ribosomal Structure in Hamburg, Germany.
Yonath devoted most of her scientific career to determining the structure of the ribosome, the cellular “factory” that produces proteins according to genetic instructions. Her decades of research included pioneering advances in cryo-bio-crystallography that transformed structural biology. In 2000, she determined the structures of the ribosome’s two subunits, an achievement ranked by Science magazine among that year’s most important scientific developments. She subsequently revealed that more than a dozen classes of antibiotics act on ribosomes, paving the way for structure-based drug design, more advanced antibiotics, and efforts to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Yonath was a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the European Molecular Biology Organization, and the International Academy of Astronautics. She received the 2002 Israel Prize in chemistry, the First European Crystallography Prize, the Kolthoff Prize, the Kilby International Award, the Harvey Prize, and numerous other international honors.
In October 2009, Yonath was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz for their studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. She was the first Israeli woman to receive a Nobel Prize, the fourth woman to win the chemistry prize, and the first female chemistry laureate in 45 years.
Yonath also became an outspoken defender of scientific and academic independence. She opposed efforts to politicize Israeli science and culture and, in 2023, joined six other Israeli Nobel laureates in warning that the government’s proposed judicial overhaul would harm research and higher education.
Yonath died on August 31, 2026, at the age of 87. President Isaac Herzog described her as one of the foremost researchers in Israeli scientific history and a global pioneer whose determination expanded the boundaries of human knowledge. She was survived by her daughter, Hagit, and granddaughter, Noa.
Source: Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2008 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.
[Bracha Rager (2nd ed.)]
Jerusalem Post.
“Nobel Prize-winning Israeli chemist Ada Yonath dies at 87,” Times of Israel, (August 31, 2026).
Photo: Rkott, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.