1 (of 28) Ada E. Yonath with dishes used for crystallisation experiments.
Credits: Micheline Pelletier/Corbis,
2 (of 28) Carol W. Greider in her laboratory.
Copyright © JHU Gazette 2009 Photo: Will Kirk
3 (of 28) Marie Curie in her chemistry laboratory at the Radium Institute in France, April 1921.
Source: Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands. Photographer unknown. No known copyright restrictions.
4 (of 28) Andrea Ghez next to the NIRC before it was decommissioned and brought down to the summit.
Credit: Rick Peterson/W. M. Keck Observatory
5 (of 28) Anne L’Huillier in the lab.
Photo courtesy of European Research Council
6 (of 28) Donna Strickland in the laboratory.
Courtesy of University of Waterloo
7 (of 28) Portrait of Maria Goeppert Mayer.
Photo: Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library
8 (of 28) Carolyn Bertozzi in her laboratory.
Photo: Christopher Michel
9 (of 28) Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
Photo: University of Bristol, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
10 (of 28) 2020 chemistry laureate Emmanuelle Charpentier in the laboratory.
Copyright © Hallbauer und Fioretti
11 (of 28) Chemistry laureate Frances Arnold in the laboratory
Photo kindly provided by Caltech
12 (of 28) Irène Joliot-Curie in the laboratory at the Radium Institute in 1921.
© Association Curie Joliot-Curie
13 (of 28) Biochemist Jennifer Doudna with a model of CRISPR-Cas9.
UC Berkeley photo by Stephen McNally
14 (of 28) Barbara McClintock in the lab at Cold Spring Harbor. Photo taken in April, 1963.
Source: National Institutes of Health. Courtesy of the Barbara McClintock Papers, American Philosophical Society Photographer unknown
15 (of 28) Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard discussing ‘The Genetic Revolution and its Impact on Society’ at Nobel Week Dialogue, December 2012.
© Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Alex Ljungdahl
16 (of 28) Professor Elizabeth Blackburn with a microscope in the Blackburn lab, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, UCSF.
Photo: Micheline Pelletier
17 (of 28) Françoise Barré-Sinoussi.
International AIDS Society and Marcus Rose
18 (of 28) Gertrude Elion in the lab.
Courtesy of Gertrude B. Elion Foundation
19 (of 28) Gerty Cori.
Bernard Becker Medical Library Washington, University School of Medicine
20 (of 28) Katalin Karikó working in the lab.
Courtesy of University of Szeged. Photo: Istvan Sahin-Toth
21 (of 28) Linda Buck in her lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 2011.
Courtesy of Linda B. Buck
22 (of 28) May-Britt Moser in the laboratory.
Photo: Geir Mo
23 (of 28) Rita Levi-Montalcini in her laboratory. Photo taken ca 1959.
Copyright © Becker Medical Library, Washington University School of Medicine Photographer unknown Kindly provided by Becker Medical Library
24 (of 28) Rosalyn Yalow in her lab at the Bronx VA Medical Center.
Courtesy of Benjamin Yalow
25 (of 28) Tu Youyou in the laboratory.
Photo: Framepool
26 (of 28) Claudia Goldin lecturing.
© Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Nanaka Adachi.
27 (of 28) Elinor Ostrom (front) with members of the Irrigation Management Systems Study Group during field work in Nepal. Photo taken in March, 1993.
Copyright © Arizona State University
28 (of 28) Esther Duflo in Udaipur, India in 2008.
Credit: Dominic Leggett
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2002
Linda Buck was fascinated by one seemingly simple question: how does our sense of smell work? Once she started to look for the answer, she didn’t let it go. She followed the olfactory process step by step to the very heart of what makes us human: our perceptions, preferences and memories.
Linda Buck in her lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 2011.
Courtesy of Linda B. Buck
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1977
Rosalyn Yalow became a physicist at a time when being a woman was a serious impediment to success. But succeed she did. With her research partner Solomon Berson, she made a transformative contribution to medical research: the radioimmunoassay.
Discover the story of a woman who changed science.
Rosalyn Yalow in her lab at the Bronx VA Medical Center.
Courtesy of Benjamin Yalow
Nobel Prize in Physics 2020
Anne L’Huillier is the fifth woman awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics. Here, she talks about her passion for science, how she deals with failure and what skills have been important in her career.
Anne L’Huillier in the lab.
Photo courtesy of European Research Council
Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023
In this interview economic sciences laureate Claudia Goldin speaks about her decision to study the women’s labour market, how she maintains her focus and motivation and the best way to overcome obstacles.
Claudia Goldin with her diploma and medal during a visit to the Nobel Foundation on 11 December 2023.
© Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Nanaka Adachi.
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022
”I wasn’t really fixed on science”
As a young girl Carolyn Bertozzi had a lot of different interests, but when she entered a college course in organic chemistry it changed her life: “I just fell in love with the subject.”
Nobel Prize laureate Tu Youyou turned to Chinese medical texts to find a traditional cure for malaria, ultimately extracting a compound – artemisinin – that has saved millions of lives. Read her story.
Tu Youyou, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2015.
© Nobel Media. Photo: Alexander Mahmoud
With an ingenious idea and years of subsequent work, Frances Arnold turned bioengineering upside down. She pioneered the use of directed evolution to design enzymes, with applications as broad as they are essential, from drugs to renewable fuels.
Chemistry laureate Frances Arnold in the laboratory
Photo kindly provided by Caltech
“Captured for life by chemistry and by crystals,” as she described it, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin turned a childhood interest in crystals into the ground-breaking use of X-ray crystallography to “see” the molecules of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin. Learn more about this remarkable woman.
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
Andrea Ghez was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.” In this interview she speaks about how her interest in science and the universe was sparked, what advice she would give to young researchers and why she loves being a scientist.
Andrea Ghez next to the NIRC before it was decommissioned and brought down to the summit.
Credit: Rick Peterson/W. M. Keck Observatory
Many Nobel Prize laureates have often faced times of enormous disruption. Rita Levi-Montalcini faced many challenges on her road to the Nobel Prize. Born in Italy in 1909, her father did not believe in professional careers for women and did not let his daughters enroll at university. But Levi-Montalcini insisted on studying. The long road to the Nobel Prize included having to build a laboratory in her bedroom during World War II.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
© Nobel Media
“I was not always the best student with the highest grades, but my teachers saw something in me and tried to encourage me.” Medicine laureate May-Britt Moser grew up in a small town on the west coast of Norway. Later, she would uncover one of the biggest mysteries of our brain – how we know where we are and how we navigate from one place to another.
May-Britt Moser in the laboratory.
Photo: Geir Mo
Can you match the right laureate with the right discovery? Have a try!
This year’s Nobel Prize announcements will take place 6–13 October. All announcements will be streamed live here on nobelprize.org.
Photo: Patrik Lundin/The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
This year’s laureates used tools from physics to construct methods that helped lay the foundation for today’s powerful machine learning.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about proteins, life’s ingenious chemical tools.
Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun discovered microRNA, a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play a crucial role in gene regulation.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2024 is awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang, “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
The grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha, is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.
This year’s laureates have provided new insights into why there are such vast differences in prosperity between nations.
What does microRNA do?
How much do you know about the discoveries awarded the 2024 Nobel Prizes? Take our one-minute crash course on each of the prizes and find out how each have changed our world.
Learn more about the Nobel Prizes with the ready-to-use Nobel Prize lessons. Watch the videos, look through the manual and slides, print the texts for students and start the class.
© Nobel Media. Photo: Alexander Mahmoud
Watch six of the 2024 laureates talk about their research and careers in a unique roundtable discussion, Nobel Minds, moderated by BBC’s Zeinab Badawi.
Nobel Minds 2024.
© Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Clément Morin
How much do you know about blood types? Try out in this game.
Learn about conditioned reflexes in this interactive game.
This fast-paced game relies on a keen knowledge of food containing vitamin B1.
What are you looking for? Search the website.
Sir J. Fraser Stoddart passed away on 30 December 2024, aged 82. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016 “for the design and synthesis of molecular machines”.
Former US President Jimmy Carter passed away on 29 December 2024. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2002 “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development”.
Chemist Martin Karplus passed away on 28 December 2024, aged 94. He was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems”.
Physicist Leon N. Cooper passed away on 23 October 2024. He was awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics “for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity, usually called the BCS-theory”.
