Yonath

Nobel laureate Ada Yonath, the Martin S. and Helen Kimmel Professor of Structural Biology at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, will give the 2013 Efraim Racker Lecture in Biology and Medicine, “Life Expectancy,” Nov. 14 at 8 p.m. in Call Auditorium, Kennedy Hall. The lecture is open to the public.

Yonath was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2009, honored for her pioneering studies elucidating the structure and function of “one of life’s core processes: the ribosome’s translation of DNA information into life,” the Nobel Prize announcement reads. Yonath performed some of her research at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source’s macromolecular diffraction facility, MacCHESS, to probe the atomic-level structure of ribosomes. Yonath was among the first scientists to use the first CHESS experimental station designed specifically for protein crystallography.

During the mid-1980s, Yonath did formative work on well-diffracting ribosome crystals, which led to high-resolution structural models. These models are now used by scientists to develop new antibiotics that block the functioning of bacterial ribosomes.

The lecture will be followed by a reception in honor of the birth of Efraim Racker (1913-91), an artist and Cornell’s Albert Einstein Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from 1966 to 1991. When he died, he was studying the biochemical basis of cancer. The website, Efraim Racker: Scientist and Artist, will also be presented at the reception.