The phone started ringing at 2 a.m. At 4 a.m., a scheduled call from Stockholm came from the folks working on the Dec. 10 ceremony for the Nobel prize in chemistry. They needed biographical information from Yonath (photo at left), one of three winners this year.

The invitation to present at the symposium in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, extended months before the Nobel prize winners were announced Oct. 7, was a lucky pick. For much of the about 25 years that Yonath has dedicated to the three-dimensional structure of ribosomes, her work was viewed with skepticism, the Jerusalem Post wrote.

A few days before the symposium began, Yonath confirmed her attendance and traveled from Israel to RTP to present some of the most important of her ribosome findings before an auditorium packed with several hundred students and teachers.

Yonath, 70, a grandmother with a wicked sense of humor and a curly mane, is a pioneer in X-ray crystallography. She used the method to figure out the three-dimensional structure of ribosomes, folded strands of genetic code that look like balls of yarn. (Photo on right)

Her scientific breakthrough explained how these folds of code assemble proteins, strands of amino acids that are vital in just about every process within cells. Within the ball of yarn she found a molecular fossil, an ancient, active center that is similar in living organisms from bacteria to elephants (yellow section on photo on right).

Drug development is not a focus of Yonath and her laboratory at the Weizman Institute of Science in Rehovot, a city south of Tel Aviv. But her work on ribosomes helps drugmakers understand how antibiotics disrupt protein production in bacteria, how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics and why some antibiotics not only attack bacteria but also cells in the human body.

Drug-resistant strains of bacteria are a growing problem, particularly methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, a superbug that has spread beyond hospitals and can now be found in locker rooms and prisons.

“There will always be resistance [to antibiotics]. The will of the bacteria to live is stronger than our chemistry,” Yonath said during a question-and-answer session with science writers after her presentation at the symposium. But “every little detail we can add to the antibiotic way of action is important.”

Andrew Fire, a professor at Stanford University and a 2006 Nobel laureate, and Oliver Smithies, a professor at the University of North Carolina and a 2007 Nobel laureate, did Tuesday in the Triangle. Their talks spanned more than 60 years of molecular biology – tracing the understanding of what causes disease from two known proteins in the blood to thousands of known blood proteins.

At the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Fire talked about research that is under way in his lab to better understand the inner workings of the immune system. Specifically, his team is looking at changes in immune cells’ genetic code that indicate relationships between antibodies, immune system soldiers that attack bacterias and viruses, and antigens, the substances that trigger immune responses.

Fire and his team are trying to determine whether there are patterns in the relationships that would better explain the causes of allergies, autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes and muscular sclerosis and immune cell tumors like lymphoma. The research could also shed light on why some long-term HIV/AIDS survivors don’t get sick and what causes donated bone marrow to attack the body of the patient who received the transplant, also known as graft-versus-host disease. Down the road it could help with diagnosis and treatment.

At the Research Triangle Park office, Smithies turned pages in his hand-written lab notebooks to illustrate stops along the intellectual road he traveled from 1948 to 1985, when he showed that DNA sequences can be inserted in living cells. Now he’s working with nanoparticles.

During his about 60 years as a researcher, Smithies said some of his discoveries were accidental. Some he made after getting ideas from reading scientific papers. And some are the results of not giving up.

“Look for something a long way away,” he said. “Try to get there.” It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work out, he added. The main thing is to have fun along the way.