Female Nobel laureate: Too few women scientists
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Israeli scientist Ada E. Yonath, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, is one of only 16 women to win the Nobel in sciences.
“The fact that fewer women have got the prize is because there are fewer women in science, and this is a question for us: Why don’t women like to go into science?” 74-year-old Yonath told Shanghai Daily last week.
“There are fewer women even on the way to the prize, so why do you want them to get it?”
Yonath was attending an international scientific conference and symposium at Fudan University. On October 18, she also addressed students in the sciences, talking about her own work. She travels widely for academic exchanges and gives inspirational speeches.
Society may not think women can be good mothers and devote their lives to science at the same time, she said, but in reality, there are many women who are successful in both their scientific career and family.
“I don’t think women are more stupid, the brain is more or less the same, the emotions are different,” she said, “But we have to overcome the emotions.”
Yonath said the female scientists working in her group at Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, are excellent scientists, who have children and loving families.
“It’s difficult to be a scientist, but these difficulties are nothing compared to the fantastic excitement when you find something new,” she said.
Because there are so few women in the sciences, Yonath drew considerable attention when she won the Nobel, the 16th woman since Marie Curie first won it for physics in 1903. She won it for chemistry in 1911. Yonath was recognized, along with Indian-born American British Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and American Thomas A. Steitz, for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. The ribosome is a cell structure that catalyzes the assembly of protein chains.
She began her research in the 1980s and wanted to reveal how genetic code is translated into protein, but when she described her plans to determine the ribosome structure, many distinguished scientists responded with sarcasm and disbelief, she wrote in her biography in 2009.
“Consequently, I became the world’s dreamer, the village fool, the so-called scientist, and the person driven by fantasies,” she wrote.
“As long as I understood, I saw that our work would progress, though other people didn’t understand,” she said.
Yonath pioneered ribosomal crystallography to study ribosomes. Her success inspired many people to pursue similar studies.
Crystallography is the science of condensed matter with emphasis on the atomic or molecular structure and its relation to physical and chemical properties. “When I started my studies, there were 10 or 11 publications in a whole year related to the functions of ribosomes, now there are 3,000 to 4,000,” she said.
Winning the Nobel had a positive influence on her research and gave her exposure to young students, teachers and the media. “Before winning, nobody asked me,” she said.
Her granddaughter Noa, five years old when Yonath won the Nobel Prize, invited her to her kindergarten to talk about cells and ribosome.
She herself was inspired by Marie Curie. But science was not her goal while growing up in a poor family that shared a four-room apartment with two other families with children.
“My childhood memories are centered on my father’s medical conditions as well as my constant desire to understand the principles of nature around me,” she said. “Harsh conditions didn’t dampen my enormous curiosity,” she wrote in her biography.
When she was 11 years old, her father died and she helped her mother support the family by doing all kinds of jobs, from cleaning to babysitting and tutoring younger children.
She had a younger sister. Her mother didn’t know much about science but she spoke four languages.
“I thought as far ahead as the end of the week, then the end of the month and then I wanted to work on a farm. I didn’t even know about science, but I became strong,” she said.
After completing her compulsory army service in a “top secret” office of the medical forces, she enrolled in Hebrew University of Jerusalem, doing undergraduate and graduate work in chemistry, biochemistry and biophysics. She did doctoral work at the Weizmann Institute.
For young Yonath, doing scientific research and working on ribosomes was easier than her earlier life. “I had to survive as a child and my survival instinct is also strong in other aspects of life,” she said.
Ada E. Yonath was the 16th woman to win the Nobel Prize in the physical sciences. She was also the first women from the Middle East to win a Nobel Prize in science, sharing it with two other scientists.
She is the first Israeli woman to win a Nobel among 10 Israeli Nobel laureates, and the first woman in 45 years to take the chemistry prize in after British chemist Dorothy Hodgkin in 1964. She is one of the four women in the history of Nobel Prize to win in the field of chemistry. The other two were Marie Curie in 1911 and her daughter Irene Curie in 1935.
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