Presentation Speech by Professor Bo Malmström of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, The key substances of life are called enzymes. Everything we humans undertake – if we sit here enjoying the splendour of a Nobel ceremony, if we perform work, or even if we simply feel joy or…

The second Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Emil Fischer, who showed how establishing key relationships in biology can be a matter of finding the right chemistry. Fischer showed how piecing together intricate chemical details about substances in Nature that are essential for life can reveal vital information about their functions and uncover unexpected…

The history of organic synthesis starts with the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler who, in 1828, succeeded to make urea from simple materials. This was the first time when organic (=living) matter was produced from inorganic (=dead) matter. This was not believed to be possible, at the time.      By the end of the nineteenth century…

Translation from the German text I was born in Solln, near Munich, on 10 November 1918 as the third child of the Professor of Physics at the Technical College of Munich, Dr. Karl T. Fischer (died 1953), and his wife, Valentine, née Danzer (died 1935). After completing four years at elementary school I went on…

I was born on June 28, 1927, the second of three sons, in the small central Ohio town of Delaware, the home of Ohio Wesleyan University. My father and mother had moved there the previous year when he took the position of Professor of Mathematics and Chairman of the Department at Ohio Wesleyan. All of…

Hermann Staudinger was born in Worms on the 23rd of March 1881. His father was Dr. Franz Staudinger. Staudinger was educated in Worms, matriculated in 1899, and continued his studies first at the University of Halle, later at Darmstadt and Munich. He graduated at Halle in 1903 and qualified for inauguration as academic lecturer under…

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11 October 1977 has decided to award the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Professor Ilya Prigogine, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures ORDER FROM DISORDER LED TO NOBEL PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY Thermodynamics is a central branch of modern science, and its general laws…