Nobel Prize

  The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003         Credits     Editors: Gunnar von Heijne, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, Bengt Nordén, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry and Eva Krutmeijer and Malin Lindgren, Information Department, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Layout and Illustrations: Typoform Printing: Tryckindustri 2003…

  The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003         The cell’s contact with the outer world     The wall that separates a cell from its surroundings – the membrane – is not an impermeable shell. It is pierced through by various sorts of channel. The channels consist of proteins, each with its…

  The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003         Further Reading     WATER CHANNELS Appearance of water channels in Xenopus oocytes expressing red cell CHIP28 protein by G.M. Preston, T.P. Carroll, W.B. Guggino, and P. Agre, Science 256 (1992), p. 385-387 Molecular Mechanisms for Human Diseases by P. Agre and D. Kozono,…

  The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003           Peter Agre Peter Agre is Professor of Biological Chemistry and Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, USA.   Water channels: The cell leaks like a sieve     How does water actually pass through the cell membrane? The…

  The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003 The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2003 “for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes”, with one half of the prize to Peter Agre “for the discovery of water channels” and one half of the prize to Roderick MacKinnon…

  The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003           Cells signal with salt!     As you read this brief text enormous numbers of ion channels are opening and closing in your brain, of the order of 1,000,000,000,000,000 (1015). The amount of ions moving in the channels during this time would correspond…

Swedish 13 oktober 1998 har utdelat 1998 års Nobelpris i kemi inom området kvantkemi till Walter Kohn, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA och John A. Pople, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA (brittisk medborgare). Pristagarna har var för sig gjort banbrytande insatser för att utveckla metoder som kan användas för att teoretiskt studera molekylers…

  John A. Pople has developed computational methods in chemistry. These are based on different descriptions of the wave function in the Schrödinger equation. He has created a theoretical model chemistry in which a series of increasingly refined approximations systematically approaches the exact solution to the quantum-mechanical equations. In this way it has become possible…

  The mechanisms of chemical reactions can be studied with quantum-chemical methods. The Schrödinger equation gives an energy for each molecular structure. The energy curve for a given reaction path, which passes through different intermediate states (minima) and transition states (maxima), shows whether that particular mechanism is possible. The diagram shows possible mechanisms for how…

  Walter Kohn showed in 1964-65 that the energy of a quantum-mechanical system is uniquely determined by its electron density. This quantity is more easily handled than the complicated wave function in the Schrödinger equation. Kohn also provided a method which made it possible to set up equations whose solutions give the system’s electron density…