The 1938 Nobel Prize in Chemistry rewarded a prime example of how the bonds between different scientific disciplines can form in the most unexpected places. In this instance, a chemist’s curiosity for unusual interactions between molecules provided a crucial biological connection to understanding essential food nutrients important for health and disease. Richard Kuhn was fascinated…

Ever since it became clear that vitamins in food play an essential role in maintaining health and preventing diseases, these nutrients found themselves the subject of intense scrutiny by scientists eager to identify the active components and their chemical make-up. The 1937 Nobel Prize in Chemistry rewarded Walter Haworth and Paul Karrer for their individual…

There’s more to chlorophyll than simply providing plant leaves with their natural green colouring. Chlorophyll is part of the engine that drives photosynthesis, possibly the most important reaction on earth, in which light is absorbed from the sun and converted into chemical energy to fuel the growth of plants. Our understanding of the chemistry of…

One of the main tasks of organic chemistry is to investigate and reproduce artificially the carbon-containing chemicals that help drive the vital processes in animals and plants. This is important not only for broadening knowledge of chemical and biological phenomena, but also for seeking ways of applying chemistry to everyday life. Uncovering and replicating Nature’s…

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 achievements awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize in Chemistry demonstrate how the secret to constructing synthetic versions of chemicals from scratch is to work backwards. Elias Corey developed and refined a novel, reverse approach to synthesizing organic compounds – that is, compounds that contain carbon atoms – and in the process he transformed this discipline…

Plastics surround our everyday lives, and the fact that they do is thanks largely to the innovations awarded the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. By bringing order to the manner in which plastics are created, Karl Ziegler and Guilio Natta established ways of making them significantly cheaper, stronger and more versatile. Plastics are made up…

We perceive ourselves and the world around us in three dimensions, and this same point of view is crucial for understanding the way in which chemicals operate in living systems. Well-established theories predicted how atoms arrange themselves in molecules, but chemists still regarded many complex molecules involved in vital biological processes as if they were…

For centuries, philosophers, writers and musicians have all mused upon the differences between the sexes, but to scientists this can be largely explained by the actions of a variety of chemical messengers, or sex hormones, that influence the development of masculine or feminine characteristics. Very little was known about the origin of these sex hormones…

A central theme of organic chemistry is the desire to understand important biological processes through discovering and imitating the manner in which Nature constructs its key substances from their basic chemical elements. Constructing artificial versions of natural products from its chemical building blocks traditionally involved a large degree of trial and error, and consequently the…