Three win Nobel prize for mapping atoms in cell\'s factories

Two Americans and an Israeli scientist won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry today for atom-by-atom mapping of the protein-making factories within cells, a feat that has spurred the development of antibiotics, according to a report by Karl Ritter and Matt Moore on www.ap.org.



The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath\'s work on ribosomes has been fundamental to the scientific understanding of life. They will split the 10 million (US$1.4 million award).



Yonath, 70, is the fourth woman to win the Nobel chemistry prize and the first since 1964, when Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin of Britain received the award.



\"I\'m really, really happy,\" Yonath said. \"I thought it was wonderful when the discovery came. It was a series of discoveries ... We still don\'t know every, everything, but we progressed a lot.\"



Ribosomes are crucial to life because they produce the proteins that control the chemistry of plants, animals and humans. Working separately, the three laureates used a method called X-ray crystallography to pinpoint the positions of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.