Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz of the US and Ada Yonath of Israel won the Nobel Chemistry Prize yesterday for work on the ribosome, a cellular machine that makes proteins, the stuff of life.
The ribosome “reads” DNA and translates the code to make the body’s tens of thousands of different proteins, thus building and controlling life at the chemical level.
The Nobel committee said the trio’s contribution had been in X-ray crystallography that had generated 3D models, helping to show the ribosome’s individual atomic structure.
These models are now being harnessed by scientists in the quest for new microbe-killing drugs, “directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity’s suffering,” the jury said.
“Many of today’s antibiotics cure various diseases by blocking the function of bacterial ribosomes,” it said. “Without functional ribosomes, bacteria cannot survive. This is why ribosomes are such an important target for new antibiotics.”
The three worked independently of each other yet all published crucial studies on the subject in August and September 2000.
“This year’s Nobel laureates reached the finishing line almost simultaneously,” the jury said.
Yonath, 70, just the fourth woman to win the Nobel Chemistry Prize, told Swedish television by telephone from Israel just moments after the announcement was made in Stockholm that she was delighted to receive the honor.
“I was in my daughter’s home in Israel and the first reaction was overwhelming happiness. She is so proud, so this made me even happier,” she said.
Yonath, who earned her PhD in X-ray crystallography at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, is now a professor of structural biology and biomolecular structure and assembly at the same school.
Steitz said he was awake when the early-morning phone call came from Stockholm.
“Fortunately I was about to get up to go to the gym. My caller from Stockholm said I shouldn’t go to the gym [because] there would be phone calls,” he told Swedish public radio.
Steitz did his PhD in molecular biology and biochemistry at Harvard University and is now a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University in the US.
Indian-born Ramakrishnan, who received his PhD in physics from Ohio University in the US and is now a senior scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, Britain, was meanwhile modest in his first reaction.
“We’re only sort of captains of a team, lots of these ideas that led to this work ... was done by really brilliant students and post docs, so in a way, we are really representing all of that effort, representing a large endeavor,” he told Swedish radio.
He said he had not had time to inform his wife about the news when he was reached by Swedish radio’s science desk.
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said that it would redesign the written portion of the driver’s license exam to make it more rigorous. “We hope that the exam can assess drivers’ understanding of traffic rules, particularly those who take the driver’s license test for the first time. In the past, drivers only needed to cram a book of test questions to pass the written exam,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference at the Taoyuan Motor Vehicle Office. “In the future, they would not be able to pass the test unless they study traffic regulations
GAINING STEAM: The scheme initially failed to gather much attention, with only 188 cards issued in its first year, but gained popularity amid the COVID-19 pandemic Applications for the Employment Gold Card have increased in the past few years, with the card having been issued to a total of 13,191 people from 101 countries since its introduction in 2018, the National Development Council (NDC) said yesterday. Those who have received the card have included celebrities, such as former NBA star Dwight Howard and Australian-South Korean cheerleader Dahye Lee, the NDC said. The four-in-one Employment Gold Card combines a work permit, resident visa, Alien Resident Certificate (ARC) and re-entry permit. It was first introduced in February 2018 through the Act Governing Recruitment and Employment of Foreign Professionals (外國專業人才延攬及雇用法),
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
RSS