The ESRF joins the global scientific community in mourning the loss of Professor Ada Yonath, one of the most visionary and inspiring scientists of our time, and a long-standing user, advisor and friend of our facility.
In 2009, Ada Yonath was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz, for her pioneering work on the structure and function of the ribosome. This groundbreaking achievement opened an entirely new chapter in structural biology and revealed, in unprecedented molecular detail, how genetic information is translated into proteins.
The ESRF was privileged to play a pivotal role in this scientific journey. From the facility’s earliest days, Ada Yonath and her group from the Weizmann Institute of Science were among the most frequent visitors to our macromolecular crystallography beamlines, at times bringing around 500 samples every month for analysis. Datasets collected on ID13, and later on the ID14 and ID23 beamlines, underpinned many of the group’s landmark results. The extreme radiation sensitivity of ribosomal crystals drove Ada and her collaborators to adopt cryo-macromolecular crystallography, a methodology that went on to transform structural biology worldwide.
Ada Yonath gave generously of her time to the ESRF beyond her own experiments. As a member of the ESRF Science Advisory Committee, her feedback directly helped shape successive upgrades of our instrumentation.
Read more on the ESRF website