Ada Yonath was born on June 22, 1939 in Jerusalem. Her parents emigrated from Poland and Ada lived with them in Jerusalem as well as Tel Aviv.

Ada's father was a rabbi, and her family ran a local grocery store. Ada's father suffered from many illnesses and passed away when she was only 11-years-old. Her family was struggling financially after her father's death and moved to Tel Aviv to be closer to her mother's sisters. Ada took on many part time jobs to help the family survive. Her mother continued to support Ada's desire to keep on learning.

Ada ultimately became a biochemist as well as a crystallographer. Crystallography is the experimental science of determining the arrangement of atoms in crystalline solids.

Ada's achievements came during her studies of chemistry at Hebrew University. She earned her PhD from the Weizmann Institute of Science. "An organism's vital functions are managed by large, complex protein molecules produced in cells' ribosomes. There, genetic information from 'messenger RNA' is translated into chains of amino acids that then build proteins".

In the 1970s, Ada Yonath began a project that culminated in 2000 in her successful mapping (together with other researchers) of the structure of ribosomes, "which consist of hundreds of thousands of atoms, using x-ray crystallography. Among other applications, this has been important in the production of antibiotics". (Nobel Media).

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