8.15am Who’s winning so far?
A quick recap of the Nobel prizes awarded so far. Monday was the turn of the medicine or physiology prize and it went to hot favourites Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their work developing mRNA vaccines that enabled their rapid deployment during the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s not hyperbole to say that mRNA vaccines could change how quickly we can respond to new diseases and how vaccines are developed. The pair has already won the Lasker prize, the Breakthrough Prize in Biology and the Tang Prize so a Nobel wasn’t unexpected after picking up these other top prizes. Weissman and Karikó had also been tipped as potential winners for the chemistry prize but we can scratch them from the list of potential nominees for today’s prize.
Yesterday saw the physics prize awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier for their work developing attosecond pulses of light. The Nobel committee provided a helpful analogy to help understand just how brief an attosecond is – ‘an attosecond is to one second as one second is to the age of the universe’. This attosecond work has also been valuable for chemists, as it has helped them probe some of the fastest processes around such as the ejection of an electron from a molecule.
8.10am: Welcome to Chemistry World’s coverage of the Nobel prize in chemistry
Thanks for joining us this morning for the most eagerly anticipated annual event in the chemistry calendar – the Nobel prize in chemistry. We’ll be bringing you all the news and events in the run up to the announcement of the prize at 1145 CEST/UTC (1045 BST) at the earliest and following the awarding of the most prestigious prize in chemistry. We’ll be tweeting from @ChemistryWorld and you can find us on Facebook too. 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 and #nobelprize. 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. Following the prize announcement, we’ll be running a webinar on Friday afternoon (1500 BST) where we’ll be joined by special guests to talk about the research that took the chemistry prize this year. You can sign up for free.