Abstract
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009 has been awarded to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (born in Tamil Nadu −India− in 1952) presently at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (United Kingdom), to Thomas A. Steitz (born in Milwaukee−WI, USA− in 1940) Sterling Professor at Yale University and to Ada E. Yonath (born in Jerusalem −Israel− in 1939) at the Weizmann Institute of Science, for their investigations on the structure and functioning of the ribosome. The ribosomes are complex cellular particles where takes place the decoding of the genetic information and the synthesis of proteins and, consequently, play a central role in the biology of all living organisms.