FACTBOX - List of recent winners of the Nobel chemistry prize

FACTBOX - List of recent winners of the Nobel chemistry prize

2010-10-06 17:37:14 GMT+7 (ICT)

STOCKHOLM (BNO NEWS) -- American Richard Heck and Japanese researchers Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki on Wednesday were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The following is a list of recent winners of that same prize.

• 2010: American Richard Heck and Japanese researchers Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki for developing a tool that allows chemists to create sophisticated chemicals as complex as those created by nature itself.
• 2009: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath for having showed what the ribosome looks like and how it functions at the atomic level. All three have used a method called X-ray crystallography to map the position for each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.
• 2008: Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP.
• 2007: German Gerhard Ertl for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces that help man understand processes such as why iron rusts, how fuel cells function and how the catalysts in our cars work.
• 2006: American Roger D. Kornberg for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription. He was the first to create an actual picture of how transcription works at a molecular level in the important group of organisms called eukaryotes, which are organisms whose cells have a well-defined nucleus.
• 2005: Yves Chauvin, Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock for making metathesis into one of organic chemistry's most important reactions. It created many new opportunities to produce many new molecules.
• 2004: Aaron Ciechanover, Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation. In the early 1980s, the trio discovered one of the cell's most important cyclical processes, regulated protein degradation.
• 2003: Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes. Agre discovered water channels, while MacKinnon conducted structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels.
• 2002: John B. Fenn, Koichi Tanaka and Kurt Wüthrich for developing methods for identification and structure analyses of biological macromolecules.
• 2001: William S. Knowles, Ryoji Noyori and K. Barry Sharpless for the development of catalytic asymmetric synthesis.
• 2000: Alan J. Heeger, Alan G. MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa for the discovery and development of conductive polymers.

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