Just now, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was announced. They won the award for click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry

At 5:45 pm Beijing time on October 5, 2022, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was announced. Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless won the award for their outstanding contributions to the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.

Carolyn R. Bertozzi (American chemist)

Morten Meldal (Danish chemist)

K. Barry Sharpless (American chemist)

Chemistry is the science most closely related to Nobel's work, and it is also the second award-winning field mentioned by Nobel in his will.

Chemistry is more like a center at the intersection of different scientific fields . On one side, it is close to physics, which provides its theoretical basis, and on the other side, it is close to biology, because biology is actually an extension of the most complex field of the entire chemistry discipline.

In terms of award-winning fields, at least 25 winners have made contributions to organic chemistry research, more than any other field.

Judging from the development trend of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in the 20th century, with the development of computer technology, theoretical chemistry and computational chemistry will flourish in the 21st century, and the study of biological systems may become more important, shifting from single macromolecules to large interactive systems, such as chemical signals and neural functions including the brain.

187 Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded since 1901. As of 2021, a total of 187 people have won the prize.

The first Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 1901 to Dutch chemist Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff "for his discoveries of the laws of chemical kinetics and of the osmotic pressure of solutions."

British biochemist Frederick Sanger is the only scientist to date to have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice , while the other two Nobel Prize winners, Marie Curie and Linus Pauling, were in different disciplines.

Historically, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been suspended eight times, in 1916, 1917, 1919, 1924, 1933, 1940, 1941 and 1942.

List of Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry over the years:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-chemistry/

Youngest and oldest winners

The youngest Nobel Laureate in Chemistry to date is French physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 together with his wife Irène Joliot-Curie (Marie Curie’s eldest daughter). He was only 35 at the time.

Photo: Joliot-Curie couple

Historically, they missed the Nobel Prize twice :

In 1932, the Joliot-Curie couple worked together to bombard beryllium, lithium, boron and other elements with alpha rays produced by radioactive polonium, and discovered unprecedented penetrating radiation, but failed to correctly identify it. Later, it was summarized and studied by James Chadwick, a student of Ernest Rutherford, and was confirmed as a neutron. Chadwick also won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for this.

The Joliot-Curies were the first to obtain the positron in their experiment, but because they failed to correctly identify it, the honor was ultimately given to Carl David Anderson, who was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics for this.

The oldest Nobel Laureate in Chemistry is John Goodenough, who was 97 years old when he won the prize in 2019. He is also the oldest person to have ever won a Nobel Prize.

Photo: John Goodenough

Female winners

So far, among the 187 Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry, 7 are women . They are:

In 1911, Marie Curie was awarded "for her discovery of the elements radium and polonium, for her purification of radium and for her studies of the properties of this remarkable element";

In 1935, Irène Joliot-Curie and her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie were awarded the prize “for the synthesis of new radioactive elements”;

In 1964, British biochemist Dorothy Hodgkin won the award for "using X-ray technology to determine the structure of some important biochemical substances";

In 2009, Israeli crystallographer Ada E. Yonath shared the award with American biochemist Thomas Steitz and British structural biologist Venkatraman Ramakrishnan for their research on ribosome structure and function.

In 2018, American chemical engineer Frances Arnold won the award for "designing the directed evolution of enzymes";

In 2019, French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier and American biologist Jennifer Doudna won the award for "developing a method for gene editing technology."

List of Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry in the past five years

2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

German chemist Benjamin List and Scottish-American chemist David MacMillan shared the award for "the development of organic asymmetric catalysis."

2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier and American biologist Jennifer Doudna shared the award for "developing a method for genome editing."

2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

American solid-state physicist John Goodenough, British chemist Stanley Whittlingham and Japanese chemist Akira Yoshino shared the award for "developing the lithium-ion battery."

2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Frances Arnold, an American chemical engineer, won the award for "designing the directed evolution of enzymes";

American chemist George P. Smith and British biochemist Gregory P. Winter shared the award for "developing phage display technology for peptides and antibodies."

2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Swiss biophysicist Jacques Dubochet, German-American biologist Joachim Frank and Scottish molecular biologist and biophysicist Richard Henderson shared the award for "the development of cryo-electron microscopy techniques for high-resolution structural determination of biomolecules in solution."