Ada Yonath

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. ”

Waiting for me in Stockholm will be a personal assistant - Katrina from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs - as well the secretary of the Swedish Academy. They'll help us with our things and take us to our hotel. From the moment I arrive, I'll always be together with the other two laureates. ”

DNA is a code of four letters; proteins are made up of amino acids which come in 20 forms. So the ribosome is a very clever machine that reads one language and operates in another. ”

The ribosome is a machine that gets instructions from the genetic code and operates chemically in order to produce the product. ”