2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 7 October 2009.

The citation

The citation reads: "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". They share the prize equally.

The laureates

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was born in 1952 in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, India, and is affiliated with the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge. Thomas A. Steitz was born in 1940 in Milwaukee, the United States, and is affiliated with Yale University, New Haven and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Ada E. Yonath was born in 1939 in Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel), and is affiliated with the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot.

Why it matters

Ribosomes are the factories inside cells that make proteins. The three scientists mapped them atom by atom, work that is helping in the development of new antibiotics. Ramakrishnan works at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.