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| Nobel prize for chemistry announcement – live | Nobel prize for chemistry announcement – live |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| 10.40am BST10:40 | |
| But back to 2015. We expect the committee to emerge in the next few minutes to give us the name of the winner - or winners - completing the science prizes for 2015. | |
| Updated at 10.42am BST | |
| 10.39am BST10:39 | |
| One of the most memorable winners in recent years has to be Dan Shechtman, who was awarded the prize in 2011 for discovering quasicrystals. | |
| He suffered a wave of criticism from leading scientists, including Linus Pauling, who said: | |
| Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense, there are no quasi-crystals, just quasi-scientists. | |
| The pressure became so bad, Shechtman was driven out his research group. Here he is talking to the Guardian about his head of lab: | |
| He came back a couple of days later and said to me, ‘Danny, you are a disgrace to my group. I cannot be with you in the same group.’ So I left the group and found another group that adopted a scientific orphan. | |
| Extraordinary stuff. | |
| 10.31am BST10:31 | |
| How does the Nobel committee chose the winners? Here’s how: | |
| The process of selecting the Chemistry Laureates #NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/tuRsPj7NfY | |
| 10.28am BST10:28 | |
| While we’re waiting for the discussions on the chemistry prize to wrap up in Stockholm, here’s an interesting analysis from Hamish Johnston at Physics World. It shows that more than a quarter - or 51 of 198 - physics Nobel laureates are immigrants. | |
| You’ll be wondering how they defined immigrants... | |
| What do we mean by an immigrant? This is a tough question, especially in science, where people tend to move around a lot and don’t always settle in one place. For the purposes of these infographics, we have used a rather crude definition of an immigrant laureate: someone who died or currently lives in a country other than that of their birth. | |
| The UK has come out a net winner, the post goes on to say, gaining laureates from its former colonies as well as Eastern Europe. | |
| 10.21am BST10:21 | |
| Predictions from the pundits | |
| The citation trackers over at Thomson Reuters have released their annual predictions. They like the look of Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for the genome editing tool Crispr/Cas9. That would be a great result - remember, only four women have won the prize - but I wonder if it’s too soon? Others they fancy for the prize are Carolyn R. Bertozzi for bioorthogonal chemistry, which allows scientists to watch chemical reactions as they play out inside living organisms. They also mention Stanley Whittingham and John Goodenough for their work on the lithium ion battery. | |
| But who else is in the running? Peter Schultz at the Scripps Research Institute, for his work on the genetic code? Or what about John Sutherland at the Laboratory for Molecular Biology (the academic home for the most Nobel laureates in Britain, I suspect), who showed how RNA can be a starting point for life? We’ll soon find out. | |
| Updated at 10.24am BST | |
| 10.15am BST10:15 | |
| Some Nobel chemistry trivia: | |
| Only four women have won the chemistry prize. Marie Curie in 1911 for the discovery of radium and polonium, Irene Joliot-Curie (Marie’s daughter) in 1935 for the synthesis of new radioactive elements, Dorothy Hodgkin in 1964 for using x-rays to work out biochemical structures, and Ada Yonath in 2009 for her work on the ribosome. | |
| Only one person, Fred Sanger, has twice won the Nobel prize in chemistry. He won in 1958 for his work on the structure of insulin, and in 1980 for work on DNA sequencing. | |
| Frederic Joliot (Irene’s husband - he shared the 1935 prize with her) is the youngest recipient of the chemistry prize. He was 35 years old when he bagged the honour. | |
| The average age of chemistry winners is 58 at the time they get the call from Stockholm. | |
| 10.11am BST10:11 | |
| For me, the chemistry prize is Nobel’s Nobel. Chemistry was his main training and it served him and his family well. Frankly, you can’t build a global explosives industry without a sound grasp of reactions. Nobel invented dynamite in 1867, and in 1875 developed gelignite. | |
| Here’s a man - for the want of something better to do - detonating gelignite in a forest: | |
| 10.05am BST10:05 | 10.05am BST10:05 |
| The 2014 chemistry prize winners | The 2014 chemistry prize winners |
| Last year, the chemistry prize went to three researchers who developed an amazing technique called super-resolved fluorescence microscopy. With it, scientists can peer inside nerve cells, track proteins that cause disease, and watch cells divide in living embryos. It is really, really clever. | Last year, the chemistry prize went to three researchers who developed an amazing technique called super-resolved fluorescence microscopy. With it, scientists can peer inside nerve cells, track proteins that cause disease, and watch cells divide in living embryos. It is really, really clever. |
| The Nobel committee said: | The Nobel committee said: |
| Their groundbreaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nano-dimension. Today, nanoscopy is used worldwide and new knowledge of the greatest benefit to mankind is produced on a daily basis. | Their groundbreaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nano-dimension. Today, nanoscopy is used worldwide and new knowledge of the greatest benefit to mankind is produced on a daily basis. |
| Want to see what it can do? Check out the video below. What we are seeing are the neurons in the brain of a living zebrafish embryo. | Want to see what it can do? Check out the video below. What we are seeing are the neurons in the brain of a living zebrafish embryo. |
| 9.51am BST09:51 | 9.51am BST09:51 |
| A Nobel finale | A Nobel finale |
| It’s time to hear who has won the third and final Nobel science prize to be announced in Stockholm this year. This morning it’s the chemistry prize, though in recent years it’s taken on a biomedical flavour. For the winner - or more likely, winners - there’s piles of kudos and 8m Swedish kronor (£631,000) cash. You could buy a one bed flat in a soulless development in Shoreditch for that and still have change for a Nandos. | It’s time to hear who has won the third and final Nobel science prize to be announced in Stockholm this year. This morning it’s the chemistry prize, though in recent years it’s taken on a biomedical flavour. For the winner - or more likely, winners - there’s piles of kudos and 8m Swedish kronor (£631,000) cash. You could buy a one bed flat in a soulless development in Shoreditch for that and still have change for a Nandos. |
| On Monday, the 2015 medicine prize went to a Chinese pharmacologist, a Japanese microbiologist and an Irish-born American biochemist for developing drugs that have transformed the treatment of parasitic diseases. Between them Tu YouYou, William Campbell and Satoshi Omura improved the lives of millions. | On Monday, the 2015 medicine prize went to a Chinese pharmacologist, a Japanese microbiologist and an Irish-born American biochemist for developing drugs that have transformed the treatment of parasitic diseases. Between them Tu YouYou, William Campbell and Satoshi Omura improved the lives of millions. |
| Yesterday, Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald won the physics prize for their discovery of neutrino oscillations. They captured traces of the elusive particles in detectors deep underground, and in doing so revealed that they changed from one type to another as they hurtled through space. Neutrinos really are extraordinary. Every second, a thousand billion or so stream through your body without you knowing. | Yesterday, Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald won the physics prize for their discovery of neutrino oscillations. They captured traces of the elusive particles in detectors deep underground, and in doing so revealed that they changed from one type to another as they hurtled through space. Neutrinos really are extraordinary. Every second, a thousand billion or so stream through your body without you knowing. |
| But who will win the chemistry prize? Who gets to join the list of luminaries, from Linus Pauling and Ernest Rutherford to Fred Sanger and Fritz Haber? We will find out at 10.45am UK. | But who will win the chemistry prize? Who gets to join the list of luminaries, from Linus Pauling and Ernest Rutherford to Fred Sanger and Fritz Haber? We will find out at 10.45am UK. |
| Updated at 10.08am BST | Updated at 10.08am BST |