The discoveries awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry are a shining example of how fundamental research in one area of science can sometimes lead to highly beneficial applications in another. In this case, finding the key to how a marine organism produces light unexpectedly ended-up providing researchers with a powerful array of tools with…

Lying between your genes and you are molecular machines that allow the otherwise silent information wrapped-up in your DNA to speak. Working in turn to select, transmit, read and decipher the DNA code, they drive the production of all the components needed for life. Roger Kornberg’s research focuses on the earliest phases of this process,…

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Rudolph A. Marcus for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems.   Rudolph A. Marcus California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA    

Richard Ernst, a self-confessed tool maker, changed the way in which we listen to the magnetic melodies within atoms to such an extent that it became the most powerful tool in chemical analysis. At the beginning of Richard Ernst’s scientific career, who he worked with mattered more to him than what he worked on. While…

Scientific progress can be said to be determined not only by the ingenuity of basic findings but also by the key developments that expand their use. A prime example is Richard Ernst’s advances that have successfully brought a technique known as nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR, to the scientific and medical mainstream. In the late…

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Richard R. Ernst ETH, Zürich, Switzerland for his contributions to the development of the methodology of high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy.     Richard R. Ernst’s revolutionary development of the methodology of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy has transformed…

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Elias J. Corey Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA for his development of the theory and methodology of organic synthesis.    

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly to Sidney Altman and Thomas R. Cech for their discovery of catalytic properties of RNA     Sidney Altman Yale University New Haven, CT, USA Thomas R. Cech University of Colorado at Boulder, USA

In the 1980s, efforts to determine the structures of all known proteins needed to overcome one large – or more accurately speaking, microscopic – barrier. Many proteins involved in vital biological functions, such as the transport of nutrients into cells or nerve impulses, span the fatty membranes that surround every cell in order to carry…

In the first half of the 20th century, crystallization of small simple molecules had become a vital process in understanding their chemical nature, but could crystallization also help in understanding the chemical nature of vital processes? Three scientists overcame the barrier of crystallizing proteins in different ways, and for their achievements they shared the Nobel…