The 2025 Nobel prize in chemistry as it happens – live | News

8.59am The chemistry Nobel prize in numbers

Every year we look at the statistics for the chemistry prize. So far, there have been 116 chemistry prizes awarded since 1901 – the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that if one prize is awarded every year then that should be 124 prizes in all. However, the prize wasn’t awarded on eight occasions – six of those were due to world wars and another was awarded a year late and on the last occasion the committee considered that no breakthrough of suitable significance had been made. That’s was the case in 1924, which was the year no-one won the Nobel prize in chemistry. Since 1943 there’s been an unbroken run of prize giving, which is set to continue this year.

Of those 116 chemistry prize, 63 have been given to just one person, 25 to two laureates and 28 shared by three laureates. It’s now rare for a single scientist to win the chemistry prize and the last to do so was Dan Shectman in 2011 for his work on quasicrystals – crystals that display short range order, but disorder over longer distances – that he had to fight to get the scientific community to accept. Nobel prizes in the sciences are much more likely to go to multiple people, recognising that scientific discovery is rarely the work of a lone ‘scientific genius’. Many researchers and Nobel-prize watchers feel that these high profile prizes being given to three people at most is one of their greatest weaknesses. Discoveries in the modern era have been about teams of people contributing both lab work and theory, and cannot (or very rarely) be attributed to a single person.

Out of the 195 individuals awarded a chemistry Nobel prize, two have won it twice: Barry Sharpless for asymmetric epoxidation and click chemistry, and Frederick Sanger for sequencing the amino acids in insulin and developing the technology that enabled DNA sequencing. 2008 chemistry laureate Martin Chalfie told us last year that no-one knows how to go about winning a Nobel prize or they’d do it again – these two are clearly the exception here.

The youngest person to ever win a chemistry prize was Frédéric Joliot, who was 35 years old when he won it with his wife Irene Joliot-Curie for their work on radioactive elements. The oldest was John Goodenough, who was 97 years old when he won the prize for work on lithium-ion batteries. Goodenough was still active in research up until his death at 100, a month short of his 101^st birthday.

Of the 195 individuals who have won a chemistry Nobel prize, only eight have been women. The last was Carolyn Bertozzi, who won in 2022 for her research on biorthogonal chemistry.

8.48am While we wait for the announcement

If you’re puzzler and have some time to burn before 10.45am BST then our Nobel-themed crossword is for you.

8.38am Keeping it in the family

The academic family tree is ‘building a single, interdisciplinary academic genealogy’ – in other words it’s trying to create a comprehensive list of researchers across many disciplines and who trained them and who they went on to train. It is perhaps unsurprising that many Nobel prize winners have been mentored by academics who have won a Nobel prize – success breeds success. This year, however, the genealogical footprint of the physiology or medicine prize winners is very light indeed with barely any record of them on the ‘tree’. For Mary Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell this may be because they’ve worked in industry rather than academia, but for Shimon Sakaguchi, who works at Osaka University, it’s difficult to say.

For this year’s physics prize we have a better fleshed out understanding of the laureates’ academic ‘ancestry’ than this year’s physiology laureates. John Clarke was mentored by Brian Pippard at the University of Cambridge and, while Pippard was not a laureate he also mentored Brian Josephson, who won the 1973 physics prize for his theoretical work on supercurrents passing through a barrier. This year’s physics prize rewards the discovery of the phenomenon that Josephson made predictions about. Clarke’s ‘grandfathers’ were Pyotr Kapitsa (1978 physics laureate) and Ernest Rutherford (1908 physics laureate). Michel Devoret and John Martinis were, of course, mentored by a future Nobel laureate – John Clarke. This means that one of the grandfathers of these two laureates was the aforementioned Pippard. Two other famous ‘grandfathers’ can be found in their lineages – Wolfgang Pauli (1945 physics laureate) and John von Neumann, who never won a Nobel prize but is still recognised today as one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists to have ever lived.

8.31am Who’s won so far then?

In the run up to the chemistry prize, let’s recap who’s won so far. On Monday, we saw Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi recognised for their discovery of regulatory T cells. This type of T cell oversees the activity of other T cells that fight infection, preventing from going rogue and injuring the body. When there’s problems with regulatory T cells it invariably leads to serious problems such as autoimmune disease, which has made this regulatory control element of great interest to drugmakers with more than 200 trials in this area currently underway.

On Tuesday, John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis won the physics prize for their work on quantum tunnelling within an electric circuit. They discovered 40 years ago that current could tunnel across a gap in a circuit, something that could be used to develop quantum computers – these machines’ killer app is predicted to be chemistry as they can be used to accurately model molecular systems.

8.23am Welcome to Chemistry World’s live coverage of the chemistry Nobel prize

Good morning, 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 blooting from @chemistryworld.com and 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 one of our many social media accounts. 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 Nobel prizes, looking at who’s tipped to win and some Nobel trivia. We’ll also be running a special Nobel-prize themed 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). We’ll be joined by special guests to talk about the research that won the chemistry prize this year – last year we were lucky enough to have newly minted chemistry laureate and protein design pioneer David Baker join us, perhaps we’ll be lucky enough to joined by another laureate this year. You can sign up for free here.