The Nobel Prize was shared in 2009 by three scientists:

From Left: Venkataraman Ramakrishnan (MRC Molecular Biology Laboratory, Cambridge, England), Thomas Steitz (Yale University), and Ada Yonath (Weizmann Institute, Israel), for their explication of the structure of the ribosome, the complex of RNA and protein that carries out protein synthesis in cells.

The ribosome consists of two parts, labeled by their sedimentations constants, which roughly measure molecular weight and size. together they consist of more than 270,000 atoms.

The smaller (30 S) portion decodes the messenger RNA into which the genetic information has been transcribed:

The 30 S Portion of the Ribosome (Protein = Pink; RNA = Blue)	The 70 S Portion of the Ribosome (Protein = Blue; RNA = Pink)

The 70 S portion is where the amino acids are assembled into the protein. Steitz showed [Science, 2000, 289, 905, 920] that the catalysis actually is carried out by the RNA in this structure, not the protein.

The RNA basis of protein synthesis is a fossil from RNA World, the earliest years of life, when RNA was both the genetic material and the catalytic species in primitive cells.