October 7, 2009 - The 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to National Academy of Sciences members Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and foreign associate Ada E. Yonath for their studies on the structure and function of the ribosome, the component of every organism's cells that translates DNA information into action. All three winners mapped the positions of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome. Their work has been directly applied to the development of antibiotics.