Ada Yonath, who mapped the ribosome after peers called the effort fruitless, dies at 87

The idea came to her while she was recovering from an accident. In the late 1970s Yonath was laid up after a bicycle accident and doing some "easier" reading ^[12]. She was then a young scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. An article on polar bears told her that the animals pack their ribosomes in an orderly way in their cells before hibernating ^[12]. "These stay intact and functional for months. So, if polar bears knew how to do it, we could too," she reasoned, according to the Guardian ^[13].

She chose her organism to get around the ribosome's fragility. Unlike other parts of the cell, ribosomes have no protective outer membrane and are easily damaged ^[14]. She reasoned that organisms from harsh environments would have hardier ribosomes that could better survive crystallisation. So she chose Geobacillus stearothermophilus, a bacterium found around thermal vents and in desert sands ^[14]. Once she had crystals, she froze them at minus 185 degrees Celsius to stabilise their internal structure and protect them from the X-rays ^[16]. About 15 years separated those first crystals, in the mid-1980s, from the finished three-dimensional maps of 2001 and 2002 ^[19].

The Nobel committee's citation tied the work to "the development of novel antibiotic drugs in the ongoing medical struggle against ever emerging drug resistance among bacterial pathogens" ^[7]. Yonath also studied how antibiotic resistance might be overcome, and the Guardian writes that her work paved the way for new products ^[10]. The obituary does not name a drug that reached patients as a result.

Yonath was born in Jerusalem into an Orthodox Jewish family. Her parents had left Poland in 1933 for Palestine, then under British mandate ^[8]. Her father, the rabbi and grocer Hillel Lifshitz, died when she was 11, and her mother moved the family to Tel Aviv ^[8]. At the fee-paying Tichon Hadash high school she taught maths lessons in lieu of fees ^[8]. After two years of military service she studied chemistry at the Hebrew University, graduating in 1962 ^[9].

She described the reception her project got in plain terms. "I was met with disbelief, even ridicule in the international scientific community," she said later. "I was called a dreamer, a fantasist, even the village idiot. But when I succeeded, it created an overwhelming internal joy and those who once called me crazy or stupid became supporters." ^[4]

We think her career is good evidence that a structural target written off as intractable can repay years of patient work, on two conditions. The first is that it is one case. James Watson, one of the discoverers of the DNA double helix, tried to solve the same structure and failed ^[3], and one success cannot tell anyone how often bets this long end that way. The second is that, on this evidence, the scientific payoff is better documented than the clinical one.