Nobel Prize

There’s more to chlorophyll than simply providing plant leaves with their natural green colouring. Chlorophyll is part of the engine that drives photosynthesis, possibly the most important reaction on earth, in which light is absorbed from the sun and converted into chemical energy to fuel the growth of plants. Our understanding of the chemistry of…

One of the main tasks of organic chemistry is to investigate and reproduce artificially the carbon-containing chemicals that help drive the vital processes in animals and plants. This is important not only for broadening knowledge of chemical and biological phenomena, but also for seeking ways of applying chemistry to everyday life. Uncovering and replicating Nature’s…

The second Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Emil Fischer, who showed how establishing key relationships in biology can be a matter of finding the right chemistry. Fischer showed how piecing together intricate chemical details about substances in Nature that are essential for life can reveal vital information about their functions and uncover unexpected…

Plastics surround our everyday lives, and the fact that they do is thanks largely to the innovations awarded the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. By bringing order to the manner in which plastics are created, Karl Ziegler and Guilio Natta established ways of making them significantly cheaper, stronger and more versatile. Plastics are made up…

We perceive ourselves and the world around us in three dimensions, and this same point of view is crucial for understanding the way in which chemicals operate in living systems. Well-established theories predicted how atoms arrange themselves in molecules, but chemists still regarded many complex molecules involved in vital biological processes as if they were…

What links natural products like rubber and cellulose with artificial plastics is that they are made up from extraordinarily large molecules. The idea of how these molecules originate or are formed was believed to be set in stone, until Hermann Staudinger provided an audacious concept that in time helped to unravel their structural secrets. Staudinger’s…

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