Three scientists who showed how the information encoded on strands of DNA is translated into the thousands of proteins that make up living matter will share the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, the Swedish Academy of Sciences said Wednesday.
The trio are Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the M.R.C. 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 will get a third of the prize, worth 10 million Swedish kronors total, or $1.4 million, in a Dec. 10 ceremony in Stockholm.
Working independently and using, among other things, the X-rays generated by powerful particle accelerators and prodigious computer calculations, the three winners and their colleagues succeeded in mapping the locations of the hundreds of thousands of atoms in the giant molecular complexes inside cells known as ribosomes. In a news release, the Swedish academy said the three were being honored “for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level.”
The work, scientists said, has had important medical implications. Some antibiotics work by gumming up the ribosomes of bacteria, allowing those bacteria to be stopped at no danger to their host. The ribosome research, the academy said, is being used to develop new antibiotics.
Dr. Ramakrishnan was born in Chidambaram, India, in 1952 and obtained his Ph.D. at Ohio University. He holds United States citizenship. Dr. Steitz was born in Milwaukee in 1940 and got his Ph.D. from Harvard.
Dr. Yonath was born in Jerusalem in 1939, earned her Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science and has worked in Israel her whole life. She said on Wednesday that she was both surprised and not surprised at being awarded a Nobel Prize.
No comments:
Post a Comment