Nobel Prize

Presentation Speech by Professor Gunnar von Heijne of the , December 10, 2003. Translation of the Swedish text. Professor Gunnar von Heijne delivering the Presentation Speech for the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry at the Stockholm Concert Hall. Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, In the days of Alfred Nobel, the…

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The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2008 In the 1960s, when the Japanese scientist Osamu Shimomura began to study the bioluminescent jellyfish Aequorea victoria, he had no idea what a scientific revolution it would lead to. Thirty years later, Martin Chalfie used the jellyfish’s green fluorescent protein to help him study life’s smallest building block, the…

English Presentation Speech by Professor Måns Ehrenberg, Member of the ; Member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, 10 December 2008 Professor Måns Ehrenberg delivering the Presentation Speech for the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry at the Stockholm Concert Hall. Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Since its very beginning, molecular…

Creating the proteins that perform the host of tasks necessary to support life is not unlike creating a chain, link by link. In this case, the links, or amino acids, are attached sequentially to the growing chain, or peptide. Once the peptide is made, the chain folds up, either on its own or with others,…

Building complex chemicals from their simplest components in the laboratory relies on the tools available for the task, and for chemists these tools are the repertoire of reactions they have at hand. Using these reactions, synthetic organic chemists act as chemical construction engineers, gradually piecing together the correct molecules in the correct manner until the…

The two methods awarded the 1912 Nobel Prize in Chemistry changed the way in which chemists artificially created carbon-containing, or organic, compounds in the laboratory. Building such compounds is limited by the reactions that chemists have at their disposal to piece together or manipulate a series of carbon atoms to form more complex products. The…

Two of the most fundamental processes in life, the transport of oxygen by blood in animals and the absorption of light during photosynthesis in plants, rely on pigments to carry out their highly important missions. Hans Fischer received the 1930 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for showing how Nature constructs these different coloured pigments from the…

In chemistry, shape matters. For chemicals to function properly in the body it is not only important that the molecular components are connected in their correct order but also that these components occupy their correct three-dimensional positions in space. A wrongly positioned atom or structural element creates either an ineffective chemical, much like using the…