Welcome back to The Deep Dive. Today we've got
a story that, honestly, it feels like one of
those movie scripts you'd reject because it's
just a little too unbelievable. It really does.
It has all the elements, right? You've got extreme
poverty, a hero who basically has to teach herself
everything. Then you have the entire scientific
establishment, I mean everyone, saying, you're
crazy, this will never work. And then, after
all that, a discovery they want to talk to it.
It just fundamentally changes how we understand
life itself. And we're not being metaphorical.
We aren't talking about the meaning of life.
We're talking about the actual physical machinery.
Nuts and bolts. The factory floor of biology,
really. We're talking about the ribosome and
the woman who finally cracked its code, Ada Yonath.
Now, before we get into the, you know, the really
heavy science and we will get into it because
you can't appreciate the victory without understanding
the fight. That's true. We need to set the stage
for the sheer magnitude of this thing. OK, think
of it like this. For decades, we knew DNA was
the blueprint. The instructions. The instructions.
Exactly. We knew they were in there, but we didn't
really have a clue how the cell actually took
those instructions and, you know, built a living
thing from them. The machine doing the work,
the rhizome, was just a total black box. A black
box that almost everyone in the field was convinced
was impossible to open. That is the key. Impossible.
Formidable. That was the word they always used.
Formidable challenges. Which, you know, is just
the polite academic way of saying, don't even
bother, you are going to fail. But Edie Yonath
didn't listen. Thankfully. And because she didn't
listen... We now have a completely different,
a radically different understanding of how antibiotics
work, how drug resistance happens, and even the
very history of life on Earth. And the incredible
part is she did all of it, starting from a place
where she literally didn't even have money for
a notebook. Let's start right there. Let's go
back to 1939, the guerrilla quarter of Jerusalem.
Can you sort of paint a picture for us? So, yeah,
1939. This is pre -state Israel, so it's the
British Mandate of Palestine. And it's a time
of just incredible tension of uncertainty. And
for Ada's family, the Lifshitz family, that was
her maiden name, it was a time of just grinding
poverty. Her parents, Hillel and Esther, they
were from Poland, right? That's right. They were
Zionist Jews, and they had immigrated from a
town called Zduska Wola in 1933. So they got
out just in the nick of time, just before Europe
really ignited. They got out. Yes. But life in
Jerusalem was not the promised land they might
have hoped for. Her father, he wasn't a scientist
or a professor. He actually came from a long
line of rabbis. But in Jerusalem, he was running
a small grocery store. And when we say grocery
store, we shouldn't be picturing. Like a modern
supermarket? No, not at all. This was a daily
struggle for survival. The source material we
have is very blunt about it. It just says they
found it difficult to make ends meet. And I was
really struck by the description of their apartment.
It wasn't just a small apartment. It was, what,
a few rooms that they shared with several other
families? That was very common for the time and,
you know, for their economic situation. But you
have to think about what that does to a child.
Imagine the constant noise. Yeah. The absolute
lack of privacy. No space of your... None. You
are literally living on top of other people.
There's no yard to run around in. There's no
room for toys. And yet somehow out of that cramped,
loud environment, she develops this incredibly
rich internal life. There's a note here where
she recalls that books were the only thing she
had to keep her occupied. That's the escape hatch,
isn't it? When your physical world is that constricted,
you expand the mental one. Books became her whole
world. And, I mean, it also says something about
her parents. How so? Well, they're struggling
just to put bread on the table, but they clearly
valued her mind. They knew she was bright. They
made sure she went to a good school in Bate -Hackram.
They did, and that's such a crucial detail, because
Bate -Hackram was an upscale neighborhood. It
was nowhere near where they lived. They couldn't
really afford it, but they were determined to
give her a proper... education it's that classic
immigrant story you know sacrifice everything
so the kids can have a better life but then just
as she's getting started the floor just drops
out from under them her father dies he was only
42 Ada was still a young girl just 11 and suddenly
that struggling grocery store which was barely
keeping them afloat It's not even an option anymore.
The family just collapses financially. Completely.
They have to pack up and move to Tel Aviv just
to try and find some way for her mother to support
them. This is the part of the story where, for
most people, the academic dream would just die.
You lose the main breadwinner. You're in poverty.
You move to a new city. You go find a job, right?
It is. You don't aim for a prestigious high school.
You certainly don't aim for a place like Tikshon
Hadash. That was a top tier high school. But
Ada had applied and she'd been accepted. The
problem obviously was the tuition. There was
just no way her mother could pay it. So you have
this brilliant teenager. She's grieving her father
and she's holding an acceptance letter that's
basically worthless. But she doesn't give up.
And this is really the first time we see that,
that stubbornness, that sheer force of will that's
going to win her a Nobel Prize 50 years down
the line. What does she do? She goes to the school.
As a teenager. And she strikes a deal with them.
She tells them, look, I'll give math lessons
to the other students if you'll let me study
here. She offers to pay her tuition that way.
I just love that image. She's sitting in class
next to kids whose parents can just write a check
without a second thought. And she's there because
she's going to be tutoring those same kids after
the final bell rings. She's literally paying
for her seat at the table with her own brain
power. It sets a pattern for her whole life,
doesn't it? It absolutely does. She learns right
from the start that she has to work twice as
hard as everyone else just to stay in the room.
And she learns that her intellect is her primary
tool for survival. And speaking of her intellect,
it's around this time she reads a biography that
makes a huge impression on her. Marie Curie.
The famous Polish scientist. It makes perfect
sense, right? Here's another woman from Poland
from, you know, difficult circumstances who reaches
the absolute pinnacle of science. It must have
been so inspiring. But there's a really interesting
nuance here. Usually when a scientist brings
up Marie Curie, it's pure hero worship. She was
my idol. I wanted to be just like her. But Yonath
is very specific about this. She says Curie was
an inspiration, but not a role model. It's such
a telling distinction. A role model is someone
whose life path you want to emulate. To copy.
Yonath had no interest in copying anyone. She
was fascinated by the science, by the achievement,
but she was determined to forge her own unique
path. She didn't want to be the next Marie Curie.
She wanted to be the first Ada Yonath. It's that
fierce independence again. That I'll find my
own way attitude. So she finishes high school,
paying her way with math lessons, and then she
heads back to Jerusalem for university. To the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And she just
flies through it. She gets her bachelor's degree
in chemistry in 1962. Then she immediately gets
a master's in biochemistry by 1964. So you can
see her moving from the pure abstract chemistry
into the chemistry of life itself. Exactly. And
then comes the big pivot, the move that really
defines her entire career. She goes to the Weizmann
Institute of Science for her Ph .D. And her advisor
there is a man named Wolfie Traub. Right. And
the subject she takes on for her dissertation
is the X -ray crystallography of collagen. OK,
let's pause there. We need to break down X -ray
crystallography because we're going to be hearing
that term a lot. To the average person, I mean,
that sounds like something out of science fiction.
What is she actually doing? It really is a bit
like science fiction. Okay, so imagine you have
a tiny complex object like a protein molecule.
You want to see its shape, but it's way, way
too small for any normal microscope. Because
it's smaller than the wavelength of visible light.
Much smaller. A light wave just washes right
over a protein like an ocean wave washing over
a single grain of sand. You don't see the sand.
So to see it, you need something with a much,
much smaller wavelength. X -rays. But here's
the problem. You can't focus x -rays with a lens
like you can with light. There's no such thing
as an x -ray microscope, so you have to do something
clever. You take millions and millions of your
protein molecules and you get them to line up
perfectly, all facing the exact same direction
in a repeating 3D pattern. You grow a crystal.
Like a tiny, perfectly organized army of molecules.
That's a perfect analogy. A regiment of soldiers
on a parade ground. Then you take that crystal
and you blast it with a powerful beam of x -rays.
The x -rays hit the atoms in the crystal and
they bounce off. They diffract. They scatter
in a very specific pattern of spots that you
capture on a detector behind the crystal. So
you don't get a picture of the molecule itself,
you just get... A pattern of dots? You get a
diffraction pattern. It looks like a complex
star map. And then, and this is the genius part,
you use some very, very heavy mathematics, something
called Fourier transforms, to work backwards
from the pattern. You're reconstructing the object
by analyzing its shadow. In a sense, yes. It's
like being in a dark room with an invisible statue.
You start throwing thousands of tennis balls
at it, and you mark where every single ball hits
the back wall. If you throw enough tennis balls,
you can eventually figure out the exact shape.
of the indisical statue. So for her Ph .D., she's
throwing X -ray tennis balls at collagen. Exactly.
Collagen is a fibrous structural protein. It's
what keeps your skin elastic. She's learning
the trade. She's figuring out how to grow the
crystals, how to operate the X -ray machines,
and crucially, how to do the math. And she gets
her Ph .D. in 1968. She's officially Dr. Ada
Yonath. She has the credentials. And so she heads
to the U .S. for her postdoctoral work. She goes
to Carnegie Mellon in 69 and then to MIT in 1960.
I mean, this is the big leagues of science. While
she's at MIT, she spends some time in a lab at
Harvard that completely changes her trajectory.
Yes, the lab of William N. Lipscomb Jr. He was
an absolute giant in the field. He would go on
to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry himself in
1976. So she's seeing what's possible at the
highest level. Right. Being in that environment,
seeing these brilliant minds tackling enormous,
seemingly impossible questions, it just emboldened
her. She starts thinking, you know, about...
very large structures. Why is large a scary word
in crystallography? Intuitively, I think a bigger
object would be easier to see than a tiny one.
That's logical, but in biology, large almost
always means complex, and more importantly, unstable.
What do you mean by unstable? Well, a small molecule
like salt is like a hard, rigid little brick.
It's easy to stack them into a perfect crystal.
But large biological machines, like the one she
was getting interested in, they're floppy. They
have moving parts. They're flexible. They don't
want to hold still and line up in a perfect crystal
lattice. But that's exactly what Yonath decided
she wants to tackle. The biggest, floppiest machine
of all. The ribosome. That's right. She returns
to Israel in 1970. And she establishes the very
first protein crystallography laboratory in the
entire country. The first one. The first one.
And for nearly a decade, it would be the only
one. She is a complete lone wolf building this
entire field of science from the ground up in
Israel. And she sets her sights on the ribosome.
Okay, let's define the target. We know it's a
very large structure. But what is its actual
job? What does the ribosome do that makes it
worth all this effort? The ribosome is... It's
the universal translator of life. Your DNA contains
all the instructions to build you, your eye color,
your hair color, how to digest your lunch. But
the DNA itself is just a library. It just sits
there. It doesn't actually do anything. It's
passive. It's passive. The ribosome is the machine
that comes in, takes a working copy of those
instructions, a molecule called RNA, and it reads
them. And as it reads the instructions, it simultaneously
builds what the instructions describe. It builds
proteins? It builds proteins. And proteins are,
for all - practical purposes, everything. Hemoglobin,
the molecule that carries oxygen in your blood.
That's a protein. Insulin is a protein. The antibodies
fighting off your cold are proteins. The keratin
in your hair and fingernails is a protein. The
ribosome is the single machine that makes all
of them. So if it stops working? You stop working
instantly. Without the ribosome, life as we know
it is impossible. It is arguably the most important
single piece of machinery in your body. And Yonath
wanted to know how it worked, to pop the hood
and see the engine. Exactly. And to know how
any machine works, you first have to know what
it looks like. You need the blueprint. But when
she started telling people, hey, I'm going to
crystallize the ribosome and get its structure,
the reaction wasn't, you know. Great idea. Good
luck. No. The reaction was, you're wasting your
time. The notes used the phrase considerable
skepticism. Which we already established is polite
speech. Right. In reality, it was outright dismissal.
People thought she was on a fool's errand. They
thought it was a career -ending move. Why? What
was it about the ribosome that made it so much
harder than, say, the collagen she studied for
her PhD? A few really big things. First, as we
said, it's just massive. It's an enormous complex.
Second, it's not made of just one thing. It's
a messy mixture of RNA and protein, which makes
its chemistry very complicated. Okay. And third,
and this is the real killer, it's incredibly
flexible. It has to move to do its job. So trying
to get millions of these things to sit perfectly
still on a crystal was, and I'm not exaggerating,
like trying to stack a million live jellyfish
into a perfect pyramid. They just slide and wobble.
Squashed. They squash. They don't cooperate.
And if your molecules are wobbling even a tiny
bit in the crystal, your X -ray picture is just
a blurry mess. You get nothing. Worse than nothing.
You just get noise. So she spends how long? How
many years is she trying to stack these jellyfish?
Almost 20 years. 20 years. From the time she
seriously started the project in the late 70s
until she published the final high resolution
structure, it was a two decade long journey.
That's an entire scientific career for most people.
For a lot of that time, she was just fighting
constant failure. She had managed to grow some
crystals, but they'd be tiny and flawed. Or they
would dissolve as soon as she looked at them.
Or, and this was the big one, the X -rays themselves
would destroy them. Ah, right. That's the other
problem here, isn't it? The tool you're using
to see the thing is also the tool that's destroying
it. It's the ultimate catch -22 of crystallography.
To see the atoms clearly, you need a really powerful
high -energy X -ray beam. But high -energy X
-rays are ionizing radiation. They literally
cook biological matter. They snap chemical bonds.
So the very act of taking the picture is incinerating
your subject. Precisely. You'd turn on the beam,
you'd get maybe a split second of data, and then
your beautiful, precious crystal would just turn
to mush. You could never collect enough data
from a single crystal to build the full 3D model.
It really seemed like a fundamental law of physics
was standing in their way. And this is the moment
where Ada Yonath stops being just a persistent,
stubborn scientist and becomes a true inventor.
She comes up with a solution that nobody else
had seriously considered. Cryo -biocrystallography.
She freezes it. It sounds so simple when you
say it like that, right? If the thing is burning
up, just cool it down. But it's not as simple
as putting it in your kitchen freezer. What happens
when you freeze water normally? It turns into
ice. It turns into ice and ice expands. And more
importantly, ice crystals are sharp, jagged things.
Yeah. If you let sharp ice crystals form inside
your delicate, perfectly ordered ribosome crystal.
It would shatter it from the inside out. And
a grenade going off inside it. So you can't have
ice, but you still have to be frozen solid. That
sounds like a paradox. It is, but she solved
it. The solution is called vitrification. You
have to cool the crystal so incredibly fast,
we're talking about flash freezing, that the
water molecules literally don't have time to
arrange themselves into the structure of an ice
crystal. They just stop moving right where they
are. So the water becomes a solid, but without
the crystal structure. It forms a glass, a solid
amorphous state. She developed this whole technique
of looping out a crystal and plunging it into
liquid nitrogen or liquid propane at incredibly
specific speeds and temperatures to achieve this
glassy state. And what she discovered was that
at these cryogenic temperatures, we're talking
around minus 185 degrees Celsius, the crystals
became incredibly tough. They could withstand
the radiation. They could take the full blast
of the X -ray beam for much, much longer, long
enough finally to collect a complete data set.
And this technique, this wasn't just a solution
for her ribosome problem. No, this was a revolution
for the entire field. Suddenly, all those other
impossible large structures, huge viruses, complex
enzyme assemblies, they all became possible targets.
She gave the entire field of structural biology
a new superpower. So today this is standard practice.
Oh, completely routine. Every structural biology
lab in the world uses cryocrystallography now.
But they use it because she had to invent it
to solve her own unsolvable problem. So she has
the method. She can freeze the crystals. She
can hit them with the beam. She can collect the
data. And then finally, around the years 2000
and 2001, she gets the picture. She gets the
picture. She publishes the complete high -resolution
atomic structures of both of the ribosomal subunits.
Wait, there are two parts to it. That's right.
The ribosome is made of two pieces that clamp
together. There's a small subunit whose job is
to read and decode the RNA instruction sheet.
And then there's a large subunit, which is the
part that actually builds the new protein chain.
She mapped both of them. So the 20 -year quest
is over. She opens up the black box. And when
she looks at this map, this 3D landscape of atoms,
what does she see? What were the big aha moments?
The biggest, most profound discovery was deep
inside the core of the large subunit. She found
this one specific pocket, a region she called
the universal symmetrical region. Universal as
in, it's in everything. As in, it is identical
in you, in me, in the bacteria on your skin,
in a yeast cell, in an elephant, in a tree. It
has not changed in billions of years of evolution.
That implies that it must be the oldest part,
the original engine. That's exactly what it implies.
She had very likely found the protoribosome,
the ancient original machine that first allowed
life to reliably build proteins from a set of
instructions. It's like finding a fossil, but
it's a molecular fossil from the dawn of life.
That gives me chills. She's literally looking
at a piece of machinery that is maybe three billion
years old. And that's not all. This region revealed
something else that settled a huge, longstanding
debate in biology. For years, scientists had
argued about what was actually doing the work
in the ribosome. Was it the proteins in the complex
or was it the RNA? The smart money would have
been on the proteins, right? I mean, proteins
are the workers of the cell. All the enzymes
that do chemistry are proteins. That was the
central dogma. But what Ada's structure showed
with irrefutable clarity was that in the absolute
heart of the machine, the spot where the new
chemical bonds are actually being formed to link
the protein chain together. There are no proteins.
None at all. It's all RNA. So the RNA is the
engine. The RNA is the engine. The proteins are
just the scaffolding on the outside holding it
all in the right shape. She proved definitively
that the ribosome is a ribosome, an enzyme made
of RNA. This completely flips the script on the
old chicken or the egg problem of the origin
of life. It's the strongest evidence we have
for the RNA world hypothesis. The idea that early
in life's history, RNA came first. RNA was the
molecule that could both store information like
DNA and do chemical work like a protein. DNA
and proteins evolved later. And he also found
a tunnel. The source material mentions the ribosomal
tunnel. Ah, yes, the tunnel. I love this part.
Describe what that is. So as the ribosome is
knitting together these amino acids one by one,
it's creating a long growing chain, a little
protein tail. And that tail has to go somewhere
while it's being made. Yoneth's structure revealed
a physical tunnel about 100 angstroms long that
runs right through the middle of the large subunit.
It's the exit chute. It's like a birth canal
for every new protein. It is exactly like a birth
canal. But what she found later in even more
detailed studies is that it's not just a passive
pipe. The walls of the tunnel are active. They
have gating mechanisms. The tunnel actually interacts
with the new protein as it passes through. So
it can... What, check the protein for quality?
It can pause the whole process. It plays a role
in regulation. She showed that there are dynamic
elements in the tunnel involved in something
called elongation arrest. It's an intelligent
tunnel. It can sense what it's making and tell
the factory floor to stop if there's a problem.
That's unbelievably sophisticated. And we only
know any of this because you figured out how
to freeze it and take its picture. We had no
idea before that. Okay, so... We've got the origin
of life. We've got the RNA world. We've got this
intelligent protein tunnel. This is obviously
huge for fundamental basic science. But you said
at the beginning that this work also transformed
medicine. How do we get from a frozen crystal
in a lab in Israel to, you know, a pill that
I take for strep throat? This is where the story
becomes incredibly practical. This brings us
to antibiotics. We all take them, but I would
guess most people have no idea how they actually
work on a molecular level. Well, a huge class
of our most important antibiotics, things like
erythromycin, which is in the Z -Pak you take,
clindamycin, tetracyclines, they all work by
doing one thing. They attack the ribosome. They
shut down the bacteria's protein factory. Exactly.
If you shut down the factory, the bacteria can't
build new parts. It can't repair itself. It can't
reproduce. It just dies. But here's the obvious
question. I have ribosomes. You have ribosomes.
Trillions of them. Why doesn't the Z -Pak shut
down my protein factories and kill me? That is
the multi -billion dollar question in pharmacology.
It's called selectivity. And for decades before
Yonath, we knew that it worked, but we didn't
really know why it worked. It was a bit of a
mystery. We just knew through trial and error,
this chemical kills bacteria, but it doesn't
kill human cells. And Yonath's structure showed
us the why. She showed us the why at the atomic
level. She demonstrated that while that deep
universal core is the same in all life, the outer
parts of the ribosome, the parts that are more
exposed, have tiny but significant structural
differences between bacteria and humans. So the
lock on the bacterial ribosome is a slightly
different shape from the lock on the human ribosome.
That's the perfect way to put it. And an antibiotic
molecule is like a key that is shaped to fit
only the bacterial lock. Yoneth went on to map
the exact binding sites of over 20 different
antibiotics. She showed us precisely where the
drug molecule wedges itself into the bacterial
ribosome's machinery to jam the gears. She showed
us where to stick the wrench. Not just that.
Even more importantly, she showed us how the
gears learn to fight back. She illuminated the
mechanisms of antibiotic resistance. Which is
the huge crisis we're facing now where the drugs
stop working. Right. And because we now have
the high -resolution structure, we can see resistance
happening at an atomic level. For example, a
bacteria might evolve to change one single atom
on the wall of the ribosomal tunnel. Just one
tiny change. And suddenly the drug doesn't fit
anymore. Suddenly the drug can't latch on as
tightly. It just slips off. The wrench can't
get a grip. So resistance is just... a tiny structural
renovation project by the bacteria. It's molecular
redecorating to kick out the unwelcome guest.
And this is the game changer. Because Yonath
gave us the blueprint, drug companies can now
look at that newly renovated resistant ribosome
and say, okay, the bacteria changed this part
of the lock. Let's go back to the lab and design
a brand new key that fits this new lock. This
is what they call structure -based drug design.
That's it. It takes so much of the guesswork
out of it. Instead of just randomly screening
thousands of chemicals in a petri dish, hoping
one works, it becomes a rational engineering
problem. You can literally design a new drug
on a computer to fit perfectly into the target
pocket you can now see. So you can design drugs
that are more powerful or that specifically overcome
known resistance mechanisms. Exactly. So if you
or anyone you know has been cured of a nasty
bacterial infection in the last 20 years, you
owe a direct debt of gratitude to Ada Yanis'
decades of work in that lab. It's just the ultimate
vindication, isn't it? The formidable, impossible
project that everyone told her would be a waste
of time ends up providing the tools to save millions
of lives. And, you know, the world eventually
caught on. It took a while. But in 2009, the
phone call finally came from Stockholm. The Nobel
Prize in Chemistry. She shared it with two other
scientists, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas
Stites, who also did incredible work on the ribosome.
But her win was especially historic for a number
of reasons. Let's run through the stats on this
because they're pretty staggering. OK, so she
was the first Israeli woman. ever to win a Nobel
Prize in any category. Wow. She was the first
woman from anywhere in the Middle East to win
a Nobel Prize in the sciences. That is a huge
milestone for the region. But look at the gender
gap in her specific field. This one is amazing.
She was the first woman in 45 years to win the
Nobel Prize in chemistry. 45 years? Are you serious?
The last woman to win it before her was Dorothy
Hodgkin, all the way back in 1964. That is just
a staggeringly long drought. It really puts into
perspective what she was up against. The kind
of boys club that field must have been for decades.
She didn't just break the glass ceiling. She
crystallized it and shot x -rays at it. And it
wasn't just the Nobel, was it? The awards just
started pouring in. She essentially won every
major prize there is to win in science. Pretty
much. The Wolf Prize, which is a huge honor.
The Harvey Prize. The L 'Oreal UNESCO Award for
Women in Science. Even Pope Francis got in on
it. He named her as a member of the Pontifical
Academy of Sciences in 2014. Which is a fascinating
appointment for a Jewish scientist from Israel.
It just shows that great science transcends all
of those borders. And the honorary doctorates,
she has them from all over the world, France,
Poland, the UK, the Philippines. And in a really
nice full circle moment, Carnegie Mellon, where
she was just a visiting postdoc back in 69, gave
her an honorary doctorate in 2018. From a visiting
researcher to a living legend. It's a pretty
amazing arc. We've spent a lot of time on the
scientist and rightly so. But I want to spend
a minute on the person because she isn't just
a brain in a lab. She's a mother, a grandmother.
Yes, she has. One daughter, Hajit Yonath, who
is a doctor at a major Israeli hospital. So the
healing profession clearly runs in the family.
And she has a granddaughter named Noah. And she's
also someone who lives in a very complex and
fraught part of the world. She's in Israel. And
she hasn't been silent about her views on the
political situation there. No, she hasn't. And
we should be careful here just to report what
the sources say her stance is, not to interpret
it. But yes, she has been quite vocal about the
Israeli -Palestinian conflict, specifically on
the issue of prisoners. And what is her stated
position? She has publicly called for the unconditional
release of all Palestinian prisoners held by
Israel. That is a very controversial stance to
take within Israel, I would imagine. What's her
reasoning? Her logic seems to be very pragmatic,
actually. It's almost scientific. She looks at
the mechanism of the conflict. She argues that
as long as Israel holds Palestinian prisoners,
it provides a powerful motivation for militant
groups to kidnap Israeli soldiers. To use them
as bargaining chips. To use them as bargaining
chips for a prisoner exchange. Exactly. So her
argument is if you remove the prisoners from
the equation, you remove the primary incentive
for kidnapping. The quote from her is, once we
don't have any prisoners to release, they will
have no reason to kidnap soldiers. Yes. And whether
you agree or disagree. with that geopolitical
analysis, it's fascinating to see that same kind
of thinking. She looks at a complex system, a
cycle of violence, and she asks, what is the
underlying mechanism driving this? How can we
break the machine? It's the same mind that looked
at the ribosome. Exactly. In the lab, she debugs
the ribosome's translation process. In the world,
she tries to debug the incentive structure of
conflict. It's also worth noting that activism
seems to run in the family. Her cousin is Rukama
Martin, a very famous Israeli anti - occupation
activist. So we've gone on this journey from
a little girl reading books in a crowded Jerusalem
apartment to a Nobel laureate who mapped the
atomic machinery of life. When you step back
from all the details, from the x -rays and the
cryo cooling, what's the big takeaway for you
from her story? For me, it's a profound lesson
about the importance of basic science. What do
you mean by that? Ada Yonath didn't start this
project because she wanted to invent a better
antibiotic. She wasn't trying to cure anything.
She was driven by pure, fundamental curiosity.
She just wanted to know. What does this beautiful
essential machine look like? She was chasing
knowledge for its own sake. Yes. And today, you
know, funding agencies and governments, they're
often so focused on applied science. They want
to know if we give you this research grant, what
product will we have in three years? What's the
immediate return on investment? And if Jonas
had to answer that question in 1980, she would
have had nothing. She would have had nothing
to say. She was just trying to take a picture
of a jellyfish pyramid. But because she was allowed
to pursue that useless fundamental question for
20 years, we got the cures. We got the new drugs.
The applications follow the understanding. They
have to. You cannot fix what you do not understand.
You have to be willing to do the deep, slow,
patient work of just figuring out how nature
works first. And the other takeaway has to be
just that. Yeah. That resilience, that stubbornness
we talked about. Oh, absolutely. The obstacles
were just, as we said, formidable. She was a
woman in a deeply male -dominated field. She
was working in a small country, scientifically
isolated, far from the big, powerful synchrotrons
in Europe and the U .S. And she was working on
a problem that literally everyone who mattered
said was impossible. She had every single excuse
to quit. Any rational person would have quit.
But she didn't. She just froze the problem until
it stopped moving and she could finally solve
it. You know, it makes me look at the world,
at my own body, so differently. I just keep thinking
about that ribosomal tunnel. Right now, as we're
speaking, in every single one of the trillions
of cells in my body, there are millions of these
little machines just humming along, reading the
tape, knitting proteins, pushing them out through
that little tunnel. It's a constant, silent symphony
happening in the dark. And for three billion
years, It was completely in the dark until A
.D. Yonath finally figured out how to turn on
the light. That's a beautiful way to put it.
So here's the thought I want to leave our listeners
with. A .D. Yonath looked at the ribosome, which
was the impossible structure of her day, and
she invented a new way to see it using cryotechnology.
My question is, what is the next ribosome? What
do you mean by that? I mean, what is the enormous,
complex, messy biological structure or process
that we are all ignoring right now because it's
just considered too hard? What's the thing that
the scientific community is telling young, stubborn
scientists, don't bother with that, you'll fail?
The physical basis of consciousness in the brain,
maybe. The actual structures that hold a memory.
Or the precise, tangled mechanisms of aging.
The impossible is only impossible until someone
stubborn enough comes along and invents a new
kind of lens. Or a new kind of freezer. A .D.
Yonath cracked the code of life's factory. Who
is sitting in a classroom somewhere right now,
maybe struggling to pay their tuition, who's
dreaming of the next great code to crack. I can't
wait to find out. Thank you for listening to
this deep dive into the incredible life and science
of A .D. Yonath. It's a powerful reminder that
sometimes the biggest discoveries really do come
from the smallest crystals. And from the most
persistent minds. We'll see you on the next one.
Keep exploring.