François Auguste Victor Grignard was born in Cherbourg on May 6, 1871. He attended local schools during 1883-87 and in 1889 he won a scholarship to the École Normale Spécial at Cluny. After two years, the school, which was intended to produce teachers for modern secondary schools, was closed because of a dispute between supporters…

Hans Fischer was born in July 27, 1881 at Hoechst, on the river Main, in Germany. His father was Dr. Eugen Fischer, Director of the firm of Kalle & Co, Wiesbaden, and Privatdozent at the Technical High School, Stuttgart; his mother was Anna Herdegen. He went to a primary school in Stuttgart, and later to…

James Batcheller Sumner was born at Canton, Mass., on Nov. 19, 1887, as the son of Charles Sumner and Elizabeth Rand Kelly. His ancestors were Puritans who came from Bicester, England, in 1636 and settled in Boston. His father owned a large country estate, while his grandfather had a farm and also a cotton factory.…

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Presentation Speech by Professor A. Fredga, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry of Your Majesties, Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. With this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry, the Academy of Sciences wished to signalize the discovery and development of diene synthesis. This achievement falls within the domain of classical organic chemistry- the chemistry of…

18 October 1982 has decided to award the 1982 Nobel Prize for chemistry to Ph.D. Aaron Klug, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England, for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes. DEPICTING THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF LIFE Life is a chemical phenomenon. Living organisms are…

Presentation Speech by Professor Gunnar von Heijne of the , December 10, 2003. Translation of the Swedish text. Professor Gunnar von Heijne delivering the Presentation Speech for the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry at the Stockholm Concert Hall. Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, In the days of Alfred Nobel, the…

Building complex chemicals from their simplest components in the laboratory relies on the tools available for the task, and for chemists these tools are the repertoire of reactions they have at hand. Using these reactions, synthetic organic chemists act as chemical construction engineers, gradually piecing together the correct molecules in the correct manner until the…

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English Presentation Speech by Professor Sven Lidin, Member of the ; Member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, 10 December 2011 Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, For three millennia we have known that five-fold symmetry is incompatible with periodicity, and for almost three centuries we believed that periodicity was a prerequisite for…