By
Judith Sudilovsky
Israel 21C
Jerusalem
----- July 30, 2008 ....... Israel Professor Ada Yonath has
become the first Israeli to win a lifetime's achievement award
from L'Oreal and UNESCO for her vital work identifying how bacteria
become resistant to antibiotics.
From trying to see if she could touch her tongue to the tip
of her nose as a young child huddled in a Jerusalem bomb shelter
during Israel's 1948 War of Independence, to accidentally starting
a fire while trying to see whether water moves faster than kerosene,
award winning Israel scientist Ada Yonath has always been fascinated
with how things work.
"All
my life there were experiments. It was just plain curiosity.
Once I broke my arm when I fell into the garden trying to measure
the height of our balcony," says Yonath, 69, a molecular
biologist at the Israel Weizmann Institute of Science who recently
became the first Israeli to receive the $100,000 Life's Work
Prize for women in science from L'Oreal and UNESCO.
Yonath,
a professor of structural biology and the director of the Helen
and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and
Assembly at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, won the award
for her 25-years of research into the ribosome protein-synthesizing
system and the mode of action of antibiotics.
Widely
considered the pioneer of ribosome crystallography, Yonath has
revealed the modes of action of over 20 different antibiotics
that target bacterial ribosomes.
Through
this groundbreaking work, she has been able to identify how
bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, a problem that is
worrying the medical establishment and governments worldwide
as the growth of antibiotic resistant super bugs like MRSA,
continues unabated.
Yonath's
research lays the groundwork for scientists to start developing
new bacteria-resistant antibiotics that better target the ribosomes
of pathogens to avoid the problem of resistance.
Yonath's
natural curiosity has been indulged since her youth, she tells
ISRAEL21c. Though her parents had little opportunity
for education themselves, they were supportive and insightful
enough to assure that their unconventional daughter was given
a good academic education - even if it meant taking two buses
to get her to a school in another Jerusalem neighborhood.
"I
never thought about me being a woman or not when I did science
- I was just a human being born into an extremely poor family,"
says Yonath, whose family moved to Tel Aviv after her father
died. "We were so poor we didn't even have books."
But
one book she did manage to get her hands on and read was the
story of Madame Marie Curie, the pioneer in the field of radioactivity,
who was awarded two Noble prizes in two different scientific
fields. The story of the Polish-French scientist sparked a desire
in her to do more science.
Another
key to her successful pursuit of science was the backing and
encouragement she received from some of her teachers. Her elementary
school math teacher Zvi Vinitzky introduced her to the principal
of the elite Tichon Hahadash in Tel Aviv, Tony Halle, a German
refugee.
Taken
by the young girl's abilities, Halle admitted her to the school
although she was not able to pay for the tuition. In repayment
Yonath tutored young Bulgarian immigrants in math.
In
the past, Yonath says, the common wisdom has been that women
are not good at math or science, and that their role as mothers
precludes them from being good scientists because of the time
and dedication the profession requires.
"Women
make up half the population," she says. "I think the
population is losing half of the human brain power by not encouraging
woman to go into the sciences. Woman can do great things if
they are encouraged to do so."
She
herself has held a number of postdoctoral positions at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University, among
others. She has also won several other prizes for her work including
the Israel Prize, the Wolf Prize and Columbia University's Louis
Gross Horwitz Prize; all the while balancing her work, her family
life and raising her daughter.
"If
a woman is happy with what she is doing at home and at work
then everybody is happy," Yonath says.
Today,
plans to retire are still a long way away, and she works hard
to encourage young women to enter scientific fields by welcoming
organized groups into her lab to give them a closer look at
the scientific life through a program organized by a local high-tech
company, Elop.
"I
want them to decide for themselves if they want to study science,"
she says. "I would like woman to have the opportunity to
do what is interesting to them, to go after their curiosity.
And I would like the world to be open to that. I know in many
places there is opposition to that."
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