Recent nobel prize news has been on my radar since I woke up to find (astoundingly) that this year’s peace prize had gone to president obama. Some time elapsed before I could be convinced it was not satire.

Then I came upon this story about the upcoming announcement of the prize for economics. At the end there was mention of the 2009 prize for chemistry:

Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath of Israel shared the chemistry prize for their atom-by-atom description of ribosomes.

A release from the medical research counsel reported that

Ramakrishnan, Steitz and Yonath demonstrated what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at an atomic level using a visualisation method called X-ray crystallography to map the position of each of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

which, aside from being an astounding technical achievement, is cool because ribosomes are the parts of you which make proteins, which make up all the main parts of you. Ribosomes are like the first order nanoassemblers of terrestrial life.

Also there are movies

short video from the ramakrishnan lab

and images.

on the laboratory website.