This year’s Nobel Prize winners for medicine and physics have already been announced. Now the jury has also announced the winners for chemistry.
Stockholm – The Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year goes to the German Benjamin List and the Scottish-born US researcher David WC MacMillan for methods to accelerate chemical reactions.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday in Stockholm.
The chemistry award winners of the year have developed a new and ingenious tool for building molecules, asymmetric organocatalysis, they said. It is used to research new drugs and has also contributed to making chemistry more environmentally friendly.
Organocatalysis has developed at an amazing rate. With the help of these reactions, researchers could now manufacture many things more efficiently, from new drugs to molecules that can capture light in solar cells.
BREAKING NEWS:
The 2021 #NobelPrize in Chemistry has been awarded to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan “for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis.” pic.twitter.com/SzTJ2Chtge— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 6, 2021
The most prestigious award for chemists this year is endowed with a total of ten million crowns (around 980,000 euros). The ceremonial handover of the prizes traditionally takes place on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of the founder Alfred Nobel.
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to 185 different researchers. One of them, the Briton Frederick Sanger, received it twice. So far, seven women have been among the winners, for example Marie Curie in 1911, who discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium. In 2020 it went to the French Emmanuelle Charpentier, who works in Berlin, and to the US researcher Jennifer A. Doudna for the development of gene scissors for targeted genetic modification.
On Monday, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to David Julius (USA) and the Lebanon-born researcher Ardem Patapoutian for work on the senses of temperature and touch.
On Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the Hamburg meteorologist Klaus Hasselmann, among others. He shares half of the price with the Japanese-born American Syukuro Manabe. Both created a solid physical foundation for our knowledge of climate change. The other half goes to the Italian Giorgio Parisi for his work on understanding complex systems.
This year’s Nobel Prize winners for Literature and Peace will be announced on Thursday and Friday. The series ends on the following Monday, October 11th, with the so-called Nobel Prize for Economics donated by the Swedish Reichsbank. dpa
