Stirred and shaken! CHEMISTRY NOBELS In the International Year of Chemistry, C Sivaram charts the Nobel prize winning achievements in the field, from work on synthesis of sugars to vitamin chemistry. his year is the International Year of TChemistry. Major achievements in chemistry are recognised every year by way of the Nobel Prize. The very first Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded in 1901 went to Dutch chemist Jacobus Vant Hoff mainly for formulating laws of osmotic pressure in solutions. The 1902 prize went to Emil Fischer for work on sugar chemistry leading to synthe- sis of sugars and purines. He was a student of Adolf Von Bayer, who himself got the prize in 1905 for synthesis of organic dyes, including that of the indigo dye. This proved disastrous for the Indian indigo plant export, which was earlier the only source for the dye. Two other Fischers also got the chem- istry Nobel. One was Hans Fischer, who got it in 1930 for the constitution of chlorophyll, use of substituted porphyrins leading to eventual synthesis of haemin. In 1973, Ernst Otto Fischer shared the MIXING IT UP The very first Nobel Prize prize with Geoffrey Wilkinson for their in- in Chemistry was awarded in 1901. dependent work on organometallic ‘sand- wich’ compounds and revolutionising tran- the DNA double helix model, Perutz and sition metal chemistry with compound like Kendrew got the chemistry prize the same Ferrocene and those compounding rheni- year for their work on globular proteins, um and hydrogen or chromium with ben- thus making it an all-British affair! zene among others. Earlier in 1912, Grig- The only Russian to get the chemistry nard and Paul Sabattier shared the prize prize was Nikolai Semenov, who shared it for work on organometallic compounds in 1956 with Sir Cyril Hinshelwood for (Grignard reagents etc.) This was the first chemical chain reaction kinetics. After K shared chemistry prize. The first eleven Fukui shared the chemistry prize in 1981, prizes, including the 1911 one to Madame with Hoffmann for chemical reaction en- Curie (for isolation of radium and poloni- ergetic, several Japanese have shared the um) were given to individual chemists. The Nobel chemistry prize starting from year next shared prize in chemistry was in 1929, 2000, when Hideki Shirakawa shared the when Sir Arthur Harden shared with Von prize with Alan McDiarmid and Alan Euler for work on alcoholic fermentation Heeger for developing electrically con- of sugars. In 1935, Curie’s daughter, Irene ducting polymers. The 2001 and 2002 shared the chemistry prize with her hus- prizes also had Japanese sharing the prize, band, Frederic, for work on artificial ra- i.e., Ryogi Noyori for chiral catalysis and dioactivity, involving transmutation of alu- Koichi Tanaka for mass spectrometric minium to phosphorus. Only one other analysis of bio-molecules, respectively. The woman chemist has got the Nobel, i.e., 2010 chemistry prize was given by E Dorothy Hodgkin in 1964 for seminal work Negishi and A Suzuki sharing the prize in unraveling the structure of complex with Richard Hock for palladium catalysed molecules like, insulin and Vitamin E, cross couplings in organic synthesis of through X-ray crystallography. complex compounds. The 2008 prize also In 1903, Svante Arrhenius became the had a Japanese Osamu Shimomura shar- first Swedish to get the Nobel for his work ing the prize with Chafie and Tsien for de- on electrolytic theory of dissociation. He velopment of the green fluorescent protein was influential in the rejection of the great (GFP) as a bioscience tag. Russian chemist (and founder of the peri- In 2009, the only Indian recipient of the od table) Mendeleev for the 1906 prize. chemistry prize, Venkatraman Ramakr- ishnan, shared it with Ada Yonath and Discovery of inert gases Thomas A Steitz for work on ribosomes In 1904, British chemist Sir William Ram- and protein synthesis. In 1999, Ahmed sey won the prize for discovery of inert gases Hasan Zewail of Egypt, won the prize for in the atmosphere, like Argon, Neon, Heli- work on femtosecond chemical reactions. um, Xenon, etc. In 1906, Moissan got the Earlier in 1967, Eigen, Norrish and Porter prize for the discovery of Fluorine. Ernest also got the prize for studies of fast chem- Rutherford got the Chemistry prize in 1908 ical reactions. (all the more ironic as Buchner got it in Thermodynamics as applied to chem- 1907 for cell fermentation). Rutherford’s istry got Onsager the prize in 1968 (for re- assistant Frederic Soddy won it in 1921. ciprocal reactions) and Ilya Prigogine in Other scientists also regarded as promi- 1977 for non-equilibrium thermodynam- nent physicists who got the Nobel in chem- ics. Otto Hahn won the prize in 1944 for istry include Irving Langmuir (1932 for the all important nuclear fission of furani- his work on surface chemistry, he coined um, and Seaborg and McMillan for the terms covalence and electrovalence in transuranium elements in 1951. George his work on gas conductivity), Peter Debye Hevsey (isotope tagging, 1943), Willard in 1936 (for screening in electrolytes) and Libby (Carbon-14 dating, 1960) were the William Giauque in 1949 for cooling to other winners. very low temperatures (sub-Kelvin) by adi- Fritz Haber won the prize in 1918 abatic demagnetisation technique. Work (Haber process) and Bergius and Bosch on surface chemistry (this time for chem- in 1931 (liquefaction of coal). Harold Urey ical reactions on surfaces) was again rec- won the Nobel for heavy Hydrogen dis- ognized with a Nobel to Gerhard Ertl in covery in 1934, Zsigmondy (1925) and 2007. The other individual chemistry prize Svedberg (1926) for colloidal chemistry. (after 2000) was given in 2006, to Roger Millikan’s student, Richard Mulliken won Kornberg for his work on how DNA is con- it in 1966 for orbital models. The study of verted to RNA. His father, Arthur Korn- organic synthesis also got many prizes, in- berg had shared the 1959 Medicine prize cluding Woodward (1965) and Natta and for work on biological synthesis of RNA Ziegler (1963). and DNA. Polymer chemistry resulted in Flory get- ting the prize (1974) and Hermann Twice lucky Staudinger in 1953. Artturi Virtanen of Only Frederick Sanger has got the Nobel Finland (1945) got the prize for agricul- Prize twice in chemistry, first in 1958 for tural biochemistry and Robert Robinson his work on structure of proteins (including (1947) for plant products like alkaloid. insulin) and then again in 1980, this time Luis Leloir in 1970, for biochemical me- jointly with Paul Berg and Walter Gilbert tabolism (Leloir road), G Herzberg (1971), for determination of nucleotide sequence atomic spectroscopy, Theodore Richards in viruses. Linus Pauling, the only person (1914) and Francis Aston (1923) for atomic to get two individual Nobel prizes, got the mass spectroscopy, Melvin Calvin (1961) chemistry prize in 1954 for his work on for analysis, Paul Karrer and Walter Ha- chemical valence bonding and in 1962 the worth (1937) and Richard Kuhn (1938) for Peace prize. While Crick, Watson and vitamin chemistry, are other notable win- Wilking got the medicine prize in 1962 for ners..