On October 9th, 2009 three scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”. The awardees were Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Thomas Steitz of Yale University and Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science. The first Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen for the discovery of X-rays. Since then many Nobel Prizes have been awarded to X-ray crystallographers. The first Nobel in Chemistry that was awarded to an X-ray crystallographer was to Linus Pauling, “for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances” in 1954. The penultimate Chemistry prize was awarded to Roger Kornberg “for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription” in 2006.