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…

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I was born on July 23rd, 1906 in Sarajevo in the province of Bosnia, which then belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy and later, in 1918, became part of Yugoslavia. In the western world my birthplace has a somewhat sinister reputation that was characterized by an older tax-inspector in the Midwest of America as “the place…

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…