Nobel Prize

Presentation Speech by Professor H.G. Söderbaum, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry of , on December 10, 1922 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. One of the most fruitful ideas in the chemical research of the last century was put forward in 1869, when the Russian scientist Dmitri Ivanovitch Mendeleev drew up…

Presentation Speech by Professor A. Westgren, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry of Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. “Scheele analyses the universe on the hearth”, it was thus that Tegnér on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Swedish Academy, described the most dazzling of the works of chemistry in our country…

Linus Pauling worked in a broad range of areas within chemistry. In 1951 he published the structure of the alpha helix, which is an important basic component of many proteins.

Presentation Speech by Professor A. Fredga, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry of Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. The word sulphur may give rise to rather disparate sensations; to most people it has not a very pleasing ring. Also many chemists are inclined to keep their distance; they know that organic…

Presentation Speech by Professor A. Fredga, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry of Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. Nucleotides and nucleotide coenzymes are words that may seem strange and abstruse, but these compounds are of great importance to all of us. We have such substances everywhere in our bodies and they…

Presentation Speech by Professor K. Myrbäck, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry of Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. In order to grow and to perform its various activities, every living organism needs a supply of energy in some suitable form. In this respect the organisms existing on this planet can be…

Presentation Speech by Professor Inga Fischer-Hjalmars, University of Stockholm Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. The Greek word for Nature is jnsiz (fysis) and for Natural Science jnsich (fysiké). Later on, this science became so comprehensive that it was divided into a number of smaller domains, such as Biology, Geography, Chemistry, and Physics…

Presentation Speech by Professor S. Claesson of Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. Professor Lars Onsager has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of the reciprocal relations, named after him, and basic to irreversible thermodynamics. On hearing this motivation for the award one immediately gets a strong impression…

Presentation Speech by Professor Stig Claesson of Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, This year’s Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Dr. Gerhard Herzberg, is generally considered to be the world’s foremost molecular spectroscopist and his large institute in Ottawa is the indisputed center for such research. It is…

Presentation Speech by Professor Bengt Nordén of the , December 10, 2000. Translation of the Swedish text. Professor Bengt Nordén delivering the Presentation Speech for the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry at the Stockholm Concert Hall. Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Chemistry! We all associate chemistry with test tubes, stinking…