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Portrait of Ada Yonath

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.

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