After the awards in medicine and physics, the winners in the third scientific Nobel Prize category will be announced on Wednesday. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm will announce at 11.45 a.m. at the earliest who will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year.
Last year, the Nobel Prize in this category went to the German chemist Benjamin List and the British David MacMillan. They were honored at the time for developing an ingenious method for accelerating chemical reactions. List is director at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr, MacMillan teaches at the US University of Princeton.
As in the previous year, the Nobel Prizes are again endowed with ten million Swedish crowns (almost 920,000 euros) per category. The scientific awards often go to several winners at the same time, who have researched the same topic, for example – they then share the prize money. The prestigious Nobel medals and diplomas are traditionally awarded on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of prize donor and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896).
So far, this year’s Nobel Prize winners have been announced in two categories. On Monday, the evolutionary researcher Svante Pääbo, who works in Leipzig, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The Swede is thus honored with the renowned award for his findings on human evolution. On Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to the French Alain Aspect, the American John Clauser and the Austrian Anton Zeilinger, who were honored for their pioneering work in the field of quantum research.
After the prize in chemistry, this year’s Nobel Prize announcements are halfway through. The prize in literature follows on Thursday, and then on Friday the Nobel Peace Prize, the only one not awarded in Stockholm but in Oslo. Finally, the winners in the economics category will be announced next Monday. The prize was not donated by Nobel, but by the Swedish Riksbank.
