After I spent my compulsory army service in the 'top secret office' of the Medical Forces, where I was fortunate to be exposed to clinical and medical issues, I enrolled to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Words originating from the verb 'to die' were frequently used when I described my initial plans to determine the ribosome structure.
At the end of the 1970s, I was a young researcher at the Weizmann Institute with an ambitious plan to shed light on one of the major outstanding questions concerning living cells: the process of protein biosynthesis.
I was born in Jerusalem with a religious background and a rabbi as a father... it was rather poor, but what we did have, we did have books.
For quite a while, I didn't receive a higher academic status. I didn't feel any discrimination against me as a woman scientist, but I hadn't produced a lot of science journal articles.
There are over 7,000 different types of proteins in typical eukaryotic cells; the total number depends on the cell class and function.
