I started working on ribosomes when I was a post doc, in 1978, when it would have been impossible, really, to solve it. But, it was just a fundamental problem in biology.
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I began studying ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Moore's laboratory in 1978.
I knew the ribosome was going to be the focus of Nobel prizes. It stands at the crossroads of biology, between the gene and what comes out of the gene. But I had convinced myself I was not going to be a winner.
The success in the determination of the high-resolution structures of ribosomal subunits and eventually the whole ribosome was the culmination of decades of effort.
The ribosome is a machine that gets instructions from the genetic code and operates chemically in order to produce the product.
I remember reading a 'Scientific American' article about the use of new physical techniques - including neutron scattering - as a method for unravelling the structure of the ribosome. I was fascinated.
I used ribosomes from very, very robust bacteria under very, very active conditions and found a way - I actually took advantage of research done before me at the Weizmann, the same institute I am now - how to preserve their activity and their integrity while they crystallized.
Words originating from the verb 'to die' were frequently used when I described my initial plans to determine the ribosome structure.
In the earlier years when I started this project at Stanford University, everyone told me it was nuts to go and try to reproduce the mysterious complexities that occur in a whole cell.
By then, I was making the slow transition from classical biochemistry to molecular biology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how genes act and how proteins are made.
The moment I saw the model and heard about the complementing base pairs I realized that it was the key to understanding all the problems in biology we had found intractable - it was the birth of molecular biology.
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