“We Don’t Just Need a Few New Antibiotics, We Need an Arsenal”

In 2009, Dr. Ada Yonath became the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel Prize, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her decades-long effort to successfully map the structure of bacterial ribosomes—the complex structures that play a pivotal role in the function of all living cells. By revolutionizing a technique known as x-ray crystallography and mimicking the natural habitat of bacteria, she provided three-dimensional views of the ribosome for the first time. This breakthrough had significant implications for the discovery and development of antibiotics, some of which work by targeting bacterial ribosomes.