ribosome . `` These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics , directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity 's suffering , '' said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences , which awards the prize . Ramakrishnan , a U.S. citizen who was born in India , is a senior scientist and group leader at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge , England , according to the Nobel Prize Web site . Steitz is a professor at Yale University and an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Yale , the site said . Yonath is a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot , Israel , and director of the Helen & Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure & Assembly at the Weizmann Institute , the Nobel site said . The Nobel Prizes are being awarded this week and next . The medicine award was handed out on Monday and the one for physics on Tuesday . The prize for literature will be awarded Thursday ; the Nobel Peace Prize winner will be named on Friday , and the award in economics will be issued on Monday .
-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- Two Americans and an Israeli were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for painstakingly mapping out the thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome -- work that paves the way for new antibiotics . U.S. researcher Thomas Steitz is one of three scientists sharing the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry . Inside all animals , plants and bacteria are DNA molecules that contain the blueprint for life . Ribosomes are an organism 's protein factories . They use the information in the DNA to make the tens of thousands of proteins that enable the organism to function properly . These proteins include hormones , enzymes and hemoglobin , which transports oxygen . From a medicinal standpoint , the ribosome is important because it is what antibiotics target . In a bacterial strain , antibiotics bind to the ribosomes , preventing them from making the proteins the bacteria need to survive . Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath shared the $ 1.4 million prize for mapping the position of the thousands and thousands of atoms that make up ribosomes . Their three-dimensional models showed how different antibiotics bind to the