The 2021 Nobel prize in chemistry as it happens – live

8.14am Poll position

And Nature Chemistry editor Stuart Cantrill has run his annual who will win the chemistry Nobel on Twitter. With almost 2500 votes it’s a pretty decent cross section of the chemistry Twitterati.

8.07am Let’s start with some predictions

As always plenty of polls and predictions for the chemistry Nobel prize. Our news story attempts to round them all up including Clarivate’s analysis basis on crunching citation numbers (more on that later).

Chemistry Views magazine has also polled its readership to see who they think will win the chemistry Nobel. The wisdom of crowds suggests the next winner will be a male medicinal chemist working in North America. Looking at the votes for specific chemists Katalin Karikó, who developed the RNA technology behind the new Covid vaccines, and Omar Yaghi of meta–organic framework fame are in the lead. We won’t have long to wait to see if any of these predictions hit the target.

Sigma Xi, a global scientific society, which was formed in 1886 at Cornell University, has, in recent years, played its own forecasting game. The society has grown beyond the borders of the US and now boasts more than 60,000 members around the world and has counted among its ranks chemistry Nobel laureates Irving Langmuir, Linus Pauling and Jennifer Doudna and many others. Sigma Xi has been conducting a poll that pits fancied researchers off against one another in a knock-out competition with members voting for the winners of each play-off. This year’s winners in chemistry were Omar Yaghi and Makoto Fujita ‘for the development of metal-organic frameworks/coordination polymers and reticular chemistry; for pioneering reticular chemistry’. One of the winners of the physiology or medicine Nobel, David Julius, was featured in this competition but was knocked-out in the first round, whereas none of the physics Nobel winners even got a name-check. We’ll soon see how accurate their predictions are for the chemistry prize.

8.02am Stay in touch

We’ll be tweeting from @ChemistryWorld and you can find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/chemistryworld. You can also watch the prize announcement made live over on the Nobel Foundation site and we’ll be hosting the video here shortly before the announcement is made. If you’re on Twitter then you’ll want to follow the hashtag #chemnobel. We hope you’ll stay with us too over the next couple of hours in the run-up to the announcement as we’ll be posting some analysis of the chemistry prize, look at who’s tipped to win and some Nobel trivia. We’ll also be running a special all-things-Nobel-prize-related edition of our regular Re:action newsletter later today, rounding up the best of our stories and the rest of the web. If you’d like to receive it later today then sign-up asap.

8.00am Welcome all!

Morning everyone, and thanks for joining us whatever time it is wherever you are. Excitement is building as we get closer to the announcement of the chemistry Nobel prize later today at 11.45am CEST (10.45am BST). Quick recap: we’ve already had two of the three science Nobel prizes – Monday was the medicine or physiology prize and David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian were recognised for their work on how we perceive touch and temperature. And yesterday was physics’ turn with Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi’s work on complex systems at scales ranging from the atomic to the climate getting the Nobel nod. Chemistry is up next and the prize field feels much clearer now two giants – Crispr gene editing and lithium-ion batteries – have won (last year and the year before, respectively). Perhaps we will be in for a surprise this morning. Stick with us as the Chemistry World team will be bringing you all the news and views in the run up to the chemistry Nobel prize and of course after the announcement is made.

You can also find all our Nobel prize stories gathered on one handy page.