Prizes
Credits
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2001 Editors: Per Ahlberg, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry and Professor at Göteborg University, Eva Krutmeijer, Head of Information and Katarina Werner, Information assistant, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Layout: Kjell Lundin, Explicare ord och bild AB.…
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Hideki Shirakawa – Biographical
Biographical
For the ten years from the third grade of elementary school to the end of high school, I lived in the small city of Takayama, a town of less than sixty thousand, located in the middle of Honshu, Japan. Even though it was far away from Japan’s principal cities, Takayama has been called a “little…
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Sir William Ramsay – Biographical
Biographical
William Ramsay was born in Glasgow on October 2, 1852, the son of William Ramsay, C.E. and Catherine, née Robertson. He was a nephew of the geologist, Sir Andrew Ramsay. Until 1870 he studied in his native town, following this with a period in Fittig’s laboratory at Tübingen until 1872. While there his thesis on…
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The history of biocatalysis
1835 The Swede Jöns Jacob Berzelius describes a catalyst as a substance which can breathe life into slumbering chemical reactions. 1868 Friedrich Miescher, Switzerland isolates nucleic acids from white blood cells obtained from discarded bandages. 1877 Wilhelm Kuhne, Germany introduces the term “enzyme” and distinguishes between enzymes and bacteria. 1893 Wilhelm Ostwald, Latvia classifies enzymes…
moreCredits
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2005 Editors: Per Ahlberg, Member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, Per I. Arvidsson, Uppsala University, Jonas Förare, Eva Krutmeijer and Malin Lindgren, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Layout and Illustrations: Typoform Printing: Katarinatryck AB, 2005 Copyright © The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 2005 P.O. Box…
moreNature is chiral
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2001 The word chiral derives from the Greek word ceir (cheir), meaning hand. Our hands are chiral – the right hand is a mirror image of the left – as are most of life’s molecules such as (R)-alanine and (S)-alanine,…
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