At Evolution News & Views Casey Luskin notes that “Nobel Prize Winner Cites the ‘Ingeniously Designed’ Architecture of the Ribosome” (February 20, 2012). Everyone hastens to assure us that she doesn’t mean it … .
The available three dimensional structures of the bacterial ribosome and their subunits show that in each of the two subunits the ribosomal proteins are entangled within the complex rRNA conformation, thus maintaining a striking dynamic architecture that is ingeniously designed for their functions: precise decoding; substrate mediated peptide-bond formation and efficient polymerase activity.
(See Ada Yonath, “Supervisor’s Foreword,” in Chen Davidovich, Targeting Functional Centers of the Ribosome, p. vii (Springer-Verlag, 2011) (emphasis added).)
But they couldn’t take the 2009 Prize away from her anyway, could they? The most they could do is edit the phrase out or gloss it in the next edition of the book. When a lot of people already know.