Brief history of Nobel  prize winners

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Ramakrishnan was born in 1952 in Chidambaram India.   At Yale University  he worked on “Neutron Scattering Maps of the small ribosomal subunit of E. coli.” His work with ribosomes continued and he was able to publish a paper in August 2000 on the structure of “the Small Ribosomal Subunit of Thermos thermopiles.” In that same year he went on to publish a paper that explained antibiotic action on the 30s subunit of the Prokaryotic ribosome.  He was able to produce research regarding the cloning genes for several ribosomal proteins and determining the three dimensional structures of ribosomes. Following this project he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship from which he then began his work in X ray crystallography. [7]

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 Thomas A. Steitz was born in 1940 in the United States. He did his Undergraduate studies at Lawrence University in Chemistry and he completed his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Harvard University. Presently he is a professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. In addition to winning the 2009 Noble prize in Chemistry he was awarded the “Gairdner International award in 2007”. This award was for his work in the functions of ribosomes and RNA catalyzed reactions and how antibiotics inhibit these functions.[7]

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Younath was born in 1939 in the Guela quarter of Jerusalem. She graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry in 1962. In 1964, she completed her Master’s degree in Biochemistry. By 1968 she completed her PhD. in x ray crystallography at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Yonath did work with protein biosynthesis by ribosomal crystallography for more than twenty years. She also worked with antibiotics that target ribosomes. This experiment was essential in demonstrating the mechanism for antibiotic resistance. She invented cryo bio crystallography which is now used in structural Biology.[7]

                                                                                                     [6]

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