Nobel Prize

Richard Ernst, a self-confessed tool maker, changed the way in which we listen to the magnetic melodies within atoms to such an extent that it became the most powerful tool in chemical analysis. At the beginning of Richard Ernst’s scientific career, who he worked with mattered more to him than what he worked on. While…

Scientific progress can be said to be determined not only by the ingenuity of basic findings but also by the key developments that expand their use. A prime example is Richard Ernst’s advances that have successfully brought a technique known as nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR, to the scientific and medical mainstream. In the late…

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Elias J. Corey Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA for his development of the theory and methodology of organic synthesis.    

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly to Sidney Altman and Thomas R. Cech for their discovery of catalytic properties of RNA     Sidney Altman Yale University New Haven, CT, USA Thomas R. Cech University of Colorado at Boulder, USA

In the 1980s, efforts to determine the structures of all known proteins needed to overcome one large – or more accurately speaking, microscopic – barrier. Many proteins involved in vital biological functions, such as the transport of nutrients into cells or nerve impulses, span the fatty membranes that surround every cell in order to carry…

In the first half of the 20th century, crystallization of small simple molecules had become a vital process in understanding their chemical nature, but could crystallization also help in understanding the chemical nature of vital processes? Three scientists overcame the barrier of crystallizing proteins in different ways, and for their achievements they shared the Nobel…

Dorothy Hodgkin, one of the main founders of protein crystallography, possessed a unique mixture of skills that allowed her to extend the use of X-rays to reveal the structures of compounds that were far more complex than anything attempted before. Victory in Europe Day in Oxford, 8 May 1945. The war in Europe was over,…

Obtaining chemical structures with X-rays is more than just a matter of passing X-rays through crystals and generating data that reveal the final structure. The scientist’s ability to handle the data and ‘see’ the structure is of vital importance, and Dorothy Hodgkin was one of the field’s finest experts. X-ray crystallography was a relatively new…

The inspiration that X-rays could reveal the structures of chemical compounds inevitably gave way to the perspiration required to solve more and more complicated structures. Max Perutz and John Kendrew received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1962 for their major achievement of successfully using X-rays to determine the structures of complex proteins. The pattern…

For Max Perutz, proving that X-rays could reveal the structures of complex, biologically important proteins would require a large dose of inspiration followed by an even larger amount of perspiration.