Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Be Announced Wednesday

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be announced Wednesday in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. 

The announcement will be made by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded the Physics prize Tuesday to three nuclear scientists for their individual experiments in “exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules.”

The academy said Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier “have demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy.”

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was shared by Americans Carolyn R. Bertozzi and Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal of Denmark for their work in advancing the field of so-called click chemistry, described by the academy as a functional and simple form of chemistry “in which molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently.”

The Nobel announcements began Monday with the prize in Medicine going to Hungary’s Kataline Kariko and Drew Weissman of the United States for their joint research that led to the rapid development of the mRNA COVID vaccines.

The recipients of the literature and peace prizes will be announced Thursday and Friday, respectively, with the final prize for economic sciences to be announced next Monday.

All the categories except economics were established in the will of 19th century Swedish businessman Alfred Nobel, who made a fortune with his invention of dynamite.

The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, five years after his death.

The economics prize was established in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank Sveriges Riksbank in Nobel’s memory, with the first laureates, Norway’s Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen of the Netherlands, announced the next year.
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