Nobel Prize

Presentation Speech by Professor Bo G. Malmström of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, In the beginning there was light. Light played an important role in the origin of life on earth, and the radiation of the sun is an absolute prerequisite for the forms of life…

Presentation Speech by Professor H.G. Söderbaum, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry of , on December 10, 1930 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. “Blood is a very special liquid”, this was asserted some 140 years ago by Goethe. When writing these words and ascribing them to Mephistopheles he probably had in…

Presentation Speech by Professor A. Westgren, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry of t Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. In his famous treatise on air and fire, published in 1777, Scheele writes that in some quarters at that time it was regarded as futile to make any more research into what…

Presentation Speech by Professor Lennart Eberson of the Translation of the Swedish text Majesties, Your Royal Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen, We like to think that everything worth knowing about the chemical elements is already known, and that carbon – one of our most thoroughly researched elements – could not possibly yield further important discoveries. Carbon…

Presentation Speech by Professor Sture Forsén of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 1991 is being awarded for methodological developments in an important spectroscopic field – nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Scientists usually refer to this method by its acronym, “NMR,” and…

Presentation Speech by Professor Karl Myrbäck, member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry of Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. The 1970 Nobel Prize for chemistry has been awarded to Dr. Luis Leloir for work of fundamental importance for biochemistry. Dr. Leloir receives the prize for his discovery of the sugar nucleotides and…

Presentation Speech by Professor Carl-Ivar Brändén of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Our genetic material, which gives every living organism its unique characteristics, is built up from large and complex DNA molecules, each comprising hundreds of millions of atoms. For a long time it was believed…

Presentation Speech by Professor H.G. Söderbaum, President of , on December 10, 1912 Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. The aim of the scientist is, or should be, to extend the limits of human knowledge. However, the roads open to him are many and he can render service in his chosen field in…

Presentation Speech by Professor Salo Gronowitz of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, The preparation of complicated organic compounds from simple and inexpensive starting materials is one of the prerequisites of our civilization, the chemical era in which we live. Organic synthesis has given us efficient methods…

Presentation Speech by Professor Bo G. Malmström of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Life is order, death is disorder. A fundamental law of Nature states that spontaneous chemical changes in the universe tend toward chaos. But life has, during milliards (American English billions) of years of…