Ada Yonath is 70 years old and grew up in Jerusalem in British-mandate Palestine, so poor she could not afford books. She is Israel's ninth Nobel laureate and first female laureate, and the fourth woman to ever win the Nobel Chemistry prize.

Professor Yonath works at the prestigious Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and has devoted her career to the study of the ribosome, which is crucial in the development of new antibiotics. She is considered a pioneer of ribosome crystallography, because she created the first ribosome crystals in 1980 and was the first to note that the ribosome is riddled with internal chambers.

"Our research spun over many years and developed in different directions... every time I thought I was facing a problem the size of the Everest only to discover there was a bigger Everest behind it," she said, recalling her happiness at the moment she finally cracked the structure of the ribosome.

Curious from a young age, Yonath was inspired to study science after reading about Marie Curie. "All my life there were experiments. It was just plain curiosity. "I never thought about me being a woman or not when I did science
-- I was just a human being born into an extremely poor family."

Yonath earned her bachelor and master's degrees at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and her PhD at the Weizmann Institute. She did post-doctoral stints at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University.

She is a strong advocate of encouraging more women to get involved in science. "Women make up half the population," she says. "I think the population is losing half of the human brain power by not encouraging women to go into the sciences. Women can do great things if they are encouraged to do so." "I would like women to have the opportunity to do what is interesting to them, to go after their curiosity. And I would like the world to be open to that. I know in many places there is opposition to that."