The 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry as it happens – live | News

9.15am An alternative chemistry laureate…

It wouldn’t be Nobel prize season without satirical takes on the prize. Last year it was Breaking Bad, this year it’s Tom from YouTube channel Explosions&Fire. 

The 2024 Noble Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to E. F. Tom for the synthesis of a substituted cubane using chemicals from a hardware store. In a shed.
byu/JImmatSci inchemistry

9.08am 100 years ago…

We have an unusual anniversary being celebrated this year. It’s the centenary of the year that no one won the Nobel prize in chemistry. We’ve got the story of what happened.

9.00am Taking the call from Sweden

‘My wife gave me a poke in the ribs and said “There’s a call for you from Stockholm”’ … ‘a high that I likened to 10 double espressos’ … ‘not a prize for the best scientist, or the smartest’. These are some of the reminiscences of the 12 chemistry Nobel prize winners who spoke to us about what it was like to win science’s highest accolade. They shared some wonderful anecdotes with us on what happened the day they won their prize, what effect this whirlwind experience had on their life and work and the advice they wished they’d been given before they won their Nobel. I’ll just leave you with a vignette from one laureate, delivered with perfect timing, who clearly could have been a comedian too. ‘…It was 2.30am in California, when any sane person is fast asleep. I was asleep too.’

8.56am Odds on favourites

This is an old set of predictions from former avid chemistry Nobel prize watcher Paul Bracher, also known by his nom de plume of ChemBark, but still one of the best in my opinion. He really knows his stuff! Bracher put out this set of odds for the chemistry prize in 2022 and it’s notable that several have won since. Carolyn Bertozzi, Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal won the chemistry prize in 2022, Louis Brus, and Alexei Ekimov in 2023 and Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman in 2023 (although they won the medicine prize). One researcher given long odds for a prize, Charles Lieber, maybe ought to have his odds increased even further after he ran into some legal trouble.

8.46am Family connections

Last year we took a look at the academic family tree of laureates to see whether they’re linked to other Nobel prize winners. Perhaps unsurprisingly there does seem to be connection, with Nobel laureates (who usually work at top institutes) mentoring junior researchers that go on to win a Nobel prize. This year, Ambros and Ruvkun were students of Robert Horvitz, who won the 2002 medicine Nobel, alongside Sydney Brenner and John Sulston. And wow, does Horvitz have an impressive list of mentors. He was trained by James Watson (medicine 1962; structure of DNA), Walter Gilbert (chemistry 1980; DNA sequencing) and Sydney Brenner (medicine 2002; cell regulation). And just to add a little more on this topic, Brenner was trained by Cyril Hinshelwood, who won the chemistry prize in 1956. Walter Gilbert is connected to Julian Schwinger (physics 1965; quantum electrodynamics) and Abdus Salam (physics 1979; weak and electromagnetic interactions). Finally, Watson was mentored by John Kendrew (chemistry 1962; structure of globular proteins) and Salvador Luria and Max Delbrück (both medicine 1969; genetic structure of viruses). The genealogy of researchers can be a fascinating topic to delve into and it’s straightforward to make a start.

For the physics prize yesterday’s winner Geoffrey Hinton isn’t directly connected to any Nobel prize winners – he has no laureate ‘parents’ or ‘grandparents’. Equally, John Hopfield has no connections to any Nobel laureates up to his ‘great grandparents’. It may be the branch of physics they work in which has meant they have little linkage to laureates as the physics prize hasn’t recognised many physicists in this field – some physicists were seen complaining yesterday that this was a prize for computer science…

8.37am Crystal-ball gazing

At this time in the morning, we always take a look at who’s the hot tip for this year’s chemistry prize. Number crunchers at Clarivate have been looking at which researchers in chemistry are in the top 0.01% when it comes to citations. Their ‘citation laureates’ this year are John Jumper, director of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, and biochemist David Baker from the University of Washington. They were picked out for their contributions to predicting protein structure. This work led to the creation of AIs, such as RoseTTAFold and AlphaFold, that surprised the world when they were able to provide highly accurate models of proteins when given nothing more than the protein’s sequence of amino acids. Recent work has suggested that these sorts of Ais, however, aren’t able to predict protein folding from first principles but work off of pattern recognition processes.

Other citation laureates tipped for the chemistry prize were physicists Roberto Car, from Princeton University, US, and Michele Parrinello at the Italian Institute of Technology, for their Car–Parrinello molecular dynamics – a computational technique that enables more efficient simulations of molecular dynamics. Kazunari Domen from the University of Tokyo in Japan, was also selected for his work on light-activated catalysts that harness sunlight to drive water-splitting reactions, a key step in producing green hydrogen. Domen’s work has been influential as his group were able to produce photocatalysts that were able to use almost all the light they absorbed to drive water splitting.

Clarivate has previously had success predicting future laureates by looking at citations, with 75 of their citation laureates going on to win an award at some point – though not usually in the year they’re highlighted. So perhaps don’t expect those above to be winners this year. The Nobel committees that make decisions on who wins a prize have been known to wait decades before awarding a prize – the work by John Goodenough that won him the 2019 chemistry Nobel prize for lithium-ion batteries at the age of 97 was done in 1976.

A poll conducted by ChemistryViews received almost 2000 votes on who its readers think is likely to be the next winner of the Nobel prize in chemistry. Half of voters expect it to be an American biochemist, with most expecting it to be another man too. Out of the many named researchers that readers think might win Chi Huey-Wong is the stand out leader with over 200 votes for his work on synthesis of oligonucleotides. Wong won the 2014 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, often a good predictor of future success (we crunched the numbers last years on which awards are indicators of future success in the chemistry prize). Other top tips (with far fewer votes I note) include next generation sequencing pioneer Shankar Balasubramanian, Karl Deisseroth for optogenetics and biomedical engineer Robert Langer.

Eagled-eyed readers will have noticed a paucity of women in the predictions above (Michele Parrinello is a man too). Women continue to be underrepresented at the top levels of science and this plays out in the Nobel prizes won by women.

8.24am Who’s won so far?

Before the chemistry prize is announced, let’s recap who’s won the other science prizes so far. On Monday, Victor Ambros from the University of Massachusetts’ Chan Medical School and Gary Ruvkun from Harvard Medical School won the medicine or physiology Nobel prize ‘for the discovery of a fundamental principle governing how gene activity is regulated’. Ruvkun and Ambros, both students of 2002 medicine laureate Robert Horvitz, discovered that microRNAs can control the production of proteins and are another, surprising layer of gene regulation. The pair won the Lasker award for basic research in 2008 alongside David Baulcombe for work on microRNAs. Lasker awards are seen as a good predictor of a future win of the physiology or medicine Nobel prize. Lasker award winners who have gone on to win a Nobel prize in recent years include John Gurdon, Tu Youyou and Thomas Südhof.

On Tuesday, the physics prize went to John Hopfield and Geoffery Hinton for their work on artificial neural networks that many of us use every day on our smartphones when making use of AI for picture editing or intelligent searches. Their work has also led to cutting edge scientific tools such as protein structure prediction programs such as RosettaFold and AlphaFold.

Just the chemistry prize left now, excitement is building with just over two hours to wait!

8.14am: Welcome to Chemistry World’s coverage of the Nobel prize in chemistry

Morning all, anything interesting happening today? Thanks for joining us for the most eagerly anticipated annual event in the chemistry calendar – the Nobel prize in chemistry. I will be your guide to all the news and events in the run-up to the announcement of the prize at 11.45 CEST/UTC (10.45 BST) at the earliest. We’ll be tweeting from @ChemistryWorld and you can find us on Facebook and LinkedIn too and find me at @PatDWalter. If you have anything you think we should share on this live page then get in touch below the line in the comments or @-us on Twitter, sorry I mean X. You can also watch the prize announcement live on the Nobel Foundation site (cameras usually turn on around 11.40 CEST/10.40 BST). If you’re on Twitter then you’ll want to follow the hashtag #chemnobel and #nobelprize for all the latest developments. We hope you’ll stay with us over the next couple of hours in the run-up to the announcement as we’ll be posting some analysis of the chemistry prize, looking 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. Following the prize announcement, we’ll also be running a webinar on Friday afternoon (1500 BST) hosted by business editor Phillip Broadwith. He’ll be joined by special guests to talk about the research that won the chemistry prize this year. You can sign up for free.