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Three scientists awarded Nobel Prize for chemistry

Wednesday, 05 October 2016 10:46 AM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 05 October 2016 10:47 AM ]

The winners of the 2016 Nobel Chemistry Prize are announced by the Nobel Committee officials during a press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm, October 5, 2016. (Photo by AFP)

The 2016 Nobel Prize for chemistry has been awarded to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa from France, Scotland and the Netherlands, respectively, for work on the design and synthesis of nano-sized molecular machines.

“They have developed molecules with controllable movements, which can perform a task when energy is added,” the award-giving body, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said in a statement on Wednesday.

Chemistry is the third of this year’s Nobel prizes to have been awarded. The medicine prize on Monday went to Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi for his studies on autophagy, the process of recycling cellular components whose failures cause the Parkinson’s disease and diabetes.

The award for physics on Tuesday went to three physicists, namely David J. Thouless from the UK, F. Duncan M. Haldane from the UK, and J. Michael Kosterlitz from Scotland, who studied matter at the smallest scales and the coldest temperatures, which could lead to new materials and insights into phenomena such as superconductivity.

The prize ceremonies take place in Stockholm and each laureate is to receive a gold medal, a diploma, and a sum of money that has been decided by the Nobel Foundation. The Nobel Prize is widely regarded as the most prestigious award available in the fields of science and economics.

If there are two laureates in a particular category, the award, whose value reaches up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, is divided equally between the recipients. If there are three, the awarding committee has the option of dividing the grant equally, or awarding one-half to one recipient and one-quarter to each of the others. It is common for recipients to donate prize money to benefit scientific, cultural, or humanitarian causes.

The award is named after dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel and has been awarded since 1901 for achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with his will.

The awarding committee is sometimes criticized by experts for bias.

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