Ada Yonath

From the age of 11, I was cleaning floors, washing dishes, making sandwiches and being a cashier. Survival was the name of the game. Life was so hard that I had to struggle to keep up my standards. Under these conditions, I didn't think about science too much.

I am against boycotts in general: boycotts against us as well as anything and everything that can be boycotted.

It is a great honor for me to be able to express my sincere gratitude to the Nobel Foundation.

People always talk about the implication and applications of a process, but for me, the goal is purely about knowledge. Knowledge can become practical today, in 20 years, or in 500 years. Ask Newton. He didn't know there would be space research based on his accident with the apple.

The Weizmann Institute showed me respect and didn't require many administrative tasks, so I was quite independent. I did what I wanted.

My memories from my childhood are centered on my father's medical conditions alongside my constant desire to understand the principles of the nature around me.

When a man sits in our jails for a number of years, and around him friends and family become angry, that is how we create terrorists.

I was born in Jerusalem in 1939 to a poor family that shared a rented four-room apartment with two additional families and their children.

I was born in Jerusalem with a religious background and a rabbi as a father... it was rather poor, but what we did have, we did have books.

Once, when I tried to calculate the height of the balcony, I broke my arm. Another time, I wanted to see if water moves faster than kerosene. When my father came out to smoke, a fire broke out.

I was described as a dreamer, a fantasist, even as the village idiot. I didn't care. What I cared about was convincing people to allow me to go on with my work.

At the end of the 1970s, I was a young researcher at the Weizmann Institute with an ambitious plan to shed light on one of the major outstanding questions concerning living cells: the process of protein biosynthesis.