Nobel Prize for Chemistry shared by women

Carolyn Bertozzi at Stanford University, Morten Meldal at the University of Copenhagen and K Barry Sharpless at Scripps Research Institute in California were honored for finding and exploiting elegant and efficient chemical reactions to create complex molecules for the pharmaceutical industry, mapping DNA and making designer materials.

The prize, announced on Wednesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, is worth 10 million Swedish kronor 804,000 and will be shared equally among the winners. Bertozzi is the eighth woman to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in history. In 2020, Prof Emmanuel Charpentier, director of the Max Planck Research Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin and Prof Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, became the first two women to share the chemistry prize for work on the molecular scissors used to edit genetic code. Sharpless has won two Nobel Prizes for Chemistry.

On Monday, Swedish geneticist Svante P bo won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his pioneering work on ancient DNA, in particular sequencing the genetic code of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of modern humans.

Three scientists who performed groundbreaking experiments on quantum entanglement, a phenomenon described by Einstein as spooky action at a distance, have been awarded the physics prize on Tuesday. Their work laid the foundations for research into quantum computers, quantum networks and quantum encrypted communications.