Nobel Prize winner in Poland! A unique opportunity to meet Ada Yonath in person

Prof. Ada Yonath agreed to visit BioForum 2014 in Łódź, Poland. She will lead the opening of this event by giving the keynote speech. Prof. Yonath is a laureate of a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She was awarded this prestigious prize in 2009 in recognition of her work related to studies of the structure and function of the ribosome.

Prof. Ada E. Yonath was born in 1939 in Jerusalem, British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel). At the time when she was given the award, she was affiliated with Weizmann Institute of Science, where she was a crystallographer. She still works there and currently leads the group of researchers investigating structure and function of ribosome. Prof. Yonath is also the director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly in Weizmann Institute.

Prof. Yonath is personally related to Poland and the city of Łódź. Her parents immigrated from this city to Palestine in 1933, before establishment of Israel. Therefore her visit in this city, however associated with BioForum, will also have sentimental meaning. She admitted that: “Giving a talk in Łódź is specifically touching since my family comes from this area.”

What is the story behing Prof. Yonath's Nobel Prize? In 2000, teams at Weizmann and the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg, Germany – both headed by Prof. Yonath – solved, for the first time, the complete spatial structure of both subunits of a bacterial ribosome. Science magazine counted this achievement among the ten most important scientific developments of that year. The next year, Prof. Yonath's teams revealed exactly how certain antibiotics are able to eliminate pathogenic bacteria by binding to their ribosomes, preventing them from producing crucial proteins.

Prof. Yonath's studies, which have stimulated intensive research worldwide, have now gone beyond the basic structure. She has revealed in detail how the genetic information is decoded, how the ribosome's inherent flexibility contributes to antibiotic selectivity and the secrets of cross-resistance to various antibiotic families. Her findings are crucial for developing advanced antibiotics.

Now this incredible scientist comes to Poland and will be a honorable guest during BioForum 2014 in Łódź. This is a unique opportunity for people involved in research in life sciences and everyone else to meet in person such incredible and inspiring personage.

Author: Tomasz Domagała

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