Nobel Laureate Visits SSRI
On 19 February 2010, everybody at SSRI was delighted to experience the rare privilege of welcoming Professor Ada Yonath, joint winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, to our facility. Professor Yonath, together with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz, mapped the detailed structure of ribosomes, which translate the genetic code of DNA into the many thousands of proteins that form the building blocks and micro machinery animating all living things.
In many ways the research we are doing at SSRI builds upon and extends the earlier research conducted by Professor Yonath and her contemporaries. To paraphrase Newton, if we have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants, and we have been extremely fortunate and thankful to have had the pleasure of being visited by one of those Giants today.
During Professor Yonath’s tour of our facility we had opportunity to share with her some of the unique discoveries we have made during the course of our research as well as gleaning from her some of her insights into areas closely related to our work. Her manner was very relaxed and jovial, as would be expected from someone of her calibre, and the whole SSRI team was encouraged and inspired by the enthusiasm she showed for the headway we have been able to make in our research so far.
While research, by its very nature, is never complete, at SSRI we are keenly aware that we are on the verge of a biotechnological revolution, and we are doing everything we can to bring about that revolution to the benefit of large segments of humanity currently suffering from diseases for which prototype treatments already exist in the world’s biotechnical laboratories, but that have until now eluded attempts to scale them up to therapeutic quantities. We thank Professor Yonath for her support of the important work we are doing at SSRI and we look forward to sharing with her further news of our research as our work progresses.
Left to right: Dr. Mahaworasilpa, Mr. Tal, Prof. Yonath, and Dr. Kaseko
