It was a polar bear that eventually led Ada Yonath to her Nobel Prize-winning breakthrough on crystalisation of ribosomes, which are cellular `factories' crucial for protein synthesis of life. But before that came the Israeli crystallographer had to endure years of mockery and ridicule.
Her only fault was to have taken on a goal that everyone assumed was just `impossible', she told your columnist recently while travelling together to the Indian Institute of Technology, Powai. It's the sort of saga one finds in great works of fiction, in C S Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia or Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy, for instance, where a lone heroine wages a battle of wits against orthodoxy entrenched in power and conceit. And she, too, gets help from polar bears.
Unlike Goldilocks, however, Yonath did not encounter her bears in the flesh and blood. Instead, while recouping from a bicycle accident, Yonath read about an article about bears and seized upon an observation that just before hibernation their ribosomes begin to cluster together in packed arrays to protect them from degradation. This allows protein synthesis to resume upon their reawakening.
In hindsight, Yonath surmised correctly that conditions could be recreated for an orderly assembly of ribosomes that would be compatible with crystallisation. But at that time she was roundly criticised for envisioning something that was deemed to be impossible.
"They gave me all sorts of names," she recalled, "`dreamer', even `village idiot'." But she could ignore her critics because of her strong personality. This came from early exposure to extreme poverty. Her father died prematurely. Her mother too wasn't well and there was a baby sister.
By 11 she was already working and taking care of her family. "Survival is far more complicated, much more demanding (than doing science)," she says. "You can always try another approach; even change your subject when a scientific strategy or experiment fails. But when you are hungry you are hungry!"
Yonath and colleagues had to make a staggering 25,000 attempts before they succeeded in creating the first ribosome crystals. But critics kept questioning. Some accused her of lying. So how did she keep her faith? "I had my results; plus my curiosity, not the desire for money or fame. Doing science itself was fun. The insights were pure bliss, bonus."