Cambridge chemist wins Nobel prize for showing how proteins are made in cells

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Venkatraman Ramakrishnan shares the prestigious award for chemistry with Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath for elucidating how cells make proteins

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• Ian Sample
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 October 2009 11.11 BST
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The 2009 Nobel prize in chemistry goes to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Ada Yonath and Thomas Steitz for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome. Photograph: Cambridge University and Micheline Pelletier/Corbis and Yale University

The Nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three scientists for unravelling the mechanism by which cells make proteins.

The process is fundamental for life and describes how cells use genetic code to produce the building blocks of living organisms.

The prize was awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a US scientist at the Medical Research Council's prestigious Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, the American Thomas Steitz at Yale University, and an Israeli, Ada Yonath at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.

Inside every cell in all organisms, there are strands of DNA. They contain the blueprints for how a human being, a plant or a bacterium, looks and functions. But the DNA molecule is passive. If there was nothing else, there would be no life.

The blueprints are transformed into living matter through the work of structures called ribosomes. Based on the information in DNA, ribosomes make proteins to do a range of vital jobs, from making skin and bone, to building immune systems and transporting oxygen around our bodies.

There are tens of thousands of proteins in the body that build and control life at the chemical level.

Understanding ribosomes is important for a scientific understanding of life. Many of today's antibiotics cure various diseases by blocking the function of ribosomes in bacteria. Without working ribosomes, bacteria cannot survive.

The researcheres generated 3D computer models that show how antibiotics bind to ribosomes. The models are used by scientists to develop new antibiotics.

The prize of 10m Swedish kronor (£900,000) will be shared equally among them.

Water on moon...!!

Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called "unambiguous evidence" of water across the surface of the moon.

The new findings, detailed in the Sept. 25 issue of the journal Science, come in the wake of further evidence of lunar polar water ice by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and just weeks before the planned lunar impact of NASA's LCROSS satellite, which will hit one of the permanently shadowed craters at the moon's south pole in hope of churning up evidence of water ice deposits in the debris field.

The moon remains drier than any desert on Earth, but the water is said to exist on the moon in very small quantities. One ton of the top layer of the lunar surface would hold about 32 ounces of water, researchers said.

"If the water molecules are as mobile as we think they are — even a fraction of them — they provide a mechanism for getting water to those permanently shadowed craters," said planetary geologist Carle Pieters of Brown University in Rhode Island, who led one of the three studies in Science on the lunar find, in a statement. "This opens a whole new avenue [of lunar research], but we have to understand the physics of it to utilize it."

Finding water on the moon would be a boon to possible future lunar bases, acting as a potential source of drinking water and fuel.

Friendship

Friendship is the cooperative and supportive relationship between two or more people. In this sense, the term connotes a relationship which involves mutual knowledge, esteem, affection, and respect along with a degree of rendering service to friends in times of need or crisis. Friends will welcome each other's company and exhibit loyalty towards each other, often to the point of altruism. Their tastes will usually be similar and may converge, and they will share enjoyable activities. They will also engage in mutually helping behavior, such as the exchange of advice and the sharing of hardship. A friend is someone who may often demonstrate reciprocating and reflective behaviors. Yet for some, the practical execution of friendship is little more than the trust that someone will not harm them.

Value that is found in friendships is often the result of a friend demonstrating the following on a consistent basis:

• the tendency to desire what is best for the other
• sympathy and empathy
• honesty, perhaps in situations where it may be difficult for others to speak the truth, especially in terms of pointing out the perceived faults of one's counterpart
• mutual understanding

In a comparison of personal relationships, friendship is considered to be closer than association, although there is a range of degrees of intimacy in both friendships and associations. Friendship and association can be thought of as spanning across the same continuum. The study of friendship is included in sociology, social psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and zoology. Various theories of friendship have been proposed, among which are social exchange theory, equity theory, relational dialectics, and attachment styles.

In many friendships, nick names are used. An example would be "Val" for "Valerie". For Chinese names, friends may combine both the Chinese words to form 1 word and use it as a nick name. An example would be "Jinger" (pronounced: Ginger) for the Chinese name "Jing Er".