French le 8 octobre 2003 a décidé d’attribuer le Prix Nobel de Chimie de l’année 2003, »pour des découvertes concernant des canaux dans la membrane cellulaire» pour moitié à Peter Agre Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, USA »pour la découverte des canaux à eau», et pour l’autre moitié à Roderick MacKinnon Howard Hughes…

  The mechanisms of chemical reactions can be studied with quantum-chemical methods. The Schrödinger equation gives an energy for each molecular structure. The energy curve for a given reaction path, which passes through different intermediate states (minima) and transition states (maxima), shows whether that particular mechanism is possible. The diagram shows possible mechanisms for how…

Although born in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, on December 9, 1919, I moved to Kentucky in 1920, and lived in Lexington through my university years. After my bachelors degree at the University of Kentucky, I entered graduate school at the California Institute of Technology in 1941, at first in physics. Under the influence of , I…

Paul Sabatier was born at Carcassonne in Southern France on November 5, 1854. He was educated at the local Lycée and then prepared at Toulouse for the entrance examinations to the École Polytechnique and the École Normale Supérieure. He was accepted for both and chose the latter which he entered in 1874; three years later…

John Howard Northrop was born in Yonkers, New York, on July 5th, 1891. He is a direct descendant of Joseph Northrop who settled in New Milford, Connecticut in 1639, of Jonathan Edwards, President of Princeton University, 1758, and of Frederick C. Havemeyer, whose family presented Havemeyer Hall, the Chemical Laboratory, to Columbia University. His father,…

more

more

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…