Meet the Winners of Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017

sponsored links

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has today announced the winners of Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the year 2017. This prize has been jointly awarded to three researchers based in the U.S., U.K. and Switzerland for developments in electron microscopy.

Scientists Jacques Dubochet (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), Joachim Frank (Columbia University, New York, USA) and Richard Henderson (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK) won this year's 9-million-kronor ($1.1 million) Nobel Chemistry Prize 2017 for developing cryo-electron (Cryo-EM) microscopy which simplifies and improves the imaging of biomolecules.

Cryo-electron microscopy has enabled scientists to fill in previously blank spaces in research, generating images of everything from proteins that cause antibiotic resistance, to the surface of the Zika virus.

Chemistry is the third of this year's Nobel Prizes after the winners of the medicine and physics prizes were announced earlier this week. The medicine prize went to three Americans studying circadian rhythms: Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young. The physics prize went to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne for detecting gravitational waves.

The prizes are named after Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, and have been awarded since 1901 for achievements in science, literature and peace, in accordance with his will.

The literature winner will be named Thursday and the peace prize will be announced on Friday.

sponsored links