The last 10 laureates of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

These are the laureates of the last 10 editions of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded this Wednesday by the Nobel Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to the German Benjamin List and the American David MacMillan.

2021: Benjamin List (Germany) and David MacMillan (United States), for “the development of asymmetric organocatalysis”, a new tool for building molecules that has made chemistry “greener” and improved pharmaceutical research.

2020: Emmanuelle Charpentier (France) and Jennifer Doudna (United States), for their research on “molecular scissors”, a “revolutionary” advance to modify human genes and somehow rewrite DNA that can help develop new cancer therapies and make the dream of curing hereditary diseases come true.

2019: John Goodenough (United States), Stanley Whittingham (United Kingdom) and Akira Yoshino (Japan) for the invention of lithium batteries, present in many technologies in daily life.

2018: Frances H. Arnold, George P. Smith (United States) and Gregory P. Winter (United Kingdom) for their work applying the mechanisms of evolution to create new and better proteins in the laboratory.

2017: Jacques Dubochet (Switzerland), Joachim Frank (United States) and Richard Henderson (United Kingdom) for developing electron cryomicroscopy, a revolutionary method of observing molecules in 3D.

2016: Jean-Pierre Sauvage (France), Fraser Stoddart (UK) and Bernard Feringa (Holland), fathers of the tiny “molecular machines” that foreshadow the nanorobots of the future.

2015: Tomas Lindahl (Sweden), Paul Modrich (USA) and Aziz Sancar (USA / Turkey) for their work on the DNA repair mechanism, which can lead to new cancer treatments.

2014: Eric Betzig, William Moerner (United States) and Stefan Hell (Germany), for developing high-resolution fluorescent microscopy.

2013: Martin Karplus (United States / Austria), Michael Levitt (United States / United Kingdom) and Arieh Warshel (United States / Israel), for the development of multiscale models of complex chemical systems.

2012: Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka (United States) for their work on receptors that allow cells to understand their environment, an essential advance for the pharmaceutical industry.