
Staff photographer · CC BY-SA 3.0
Ada Yonath
1939 – 2026aged 87
Spent two decades on a problem the field considered unsolvable — mapping the atomic structure of the ribosome, the machine that turns genetic code into protein — and was told for years she was wasting her time. Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2009, and the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel. Her method underpins a generation of antibiotics.