Nobel Prize in Chemistry

An internationally prestigious award presented to scientists who have contributed to humanity in the field of chemistry, in accordance with Alfred Nobel's will

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Overview

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is the most prestigious international award in chemistry, awarded annually since 1901 in accordance with the will of Swedish inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel (알프레드 노벨, 1833–1896). It began as one of the five original Nobel Prize categories, along with the Physics Prize, Physiology or Medicine Prize, Literature Prize, and Peace Prize; with the addition of the Economics Prize established by Sweden's central bank in 1968, it now operates across six categories. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded broadly not only for fundamental theories of chemistry but also for innovative achievements in adjacent disciplines such as biochemistry, molecular biology, materials science, and computational chemistry, and has shed light on research that has fundamentally changed human life.

Main Content

History and Establishment Background

Alfred Nobel amassed enormous wealth through inventions of explosives, including dynamite, but agonized over seeing his inventions used in war. In his final will in 1895, he stipulated that most of his fortune be used to create a fund to award prizes to "those who have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind," including the field of chemistry. The first Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1901 went to Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff of the Netherlands, who was recognized for establishing the osmotic pressure of solutions and the laws of chemical reaction rates.

Selection Process

The laureates are selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien). Each autumn, requests for nominations are sent to scholars around the world, and the Nobel Committee reviews nominations from qualified chemists, researchers in related fields, and previous laureates. Nominations and review records remain confidential for 50 years, and under Nobel Prize rules, posthumous awards and shared awards among more than three people are in principle not permitted. Therefore, up to three people may be awarded in a given year, and the prize money is distributed among the laureates.

Major Award Cases

1901 van 't Hoff: Chemical kinetics and the law of osmotic pressure
1911 Marie Curie: Discovery of radium and polonium, and isolation of radium. Curie is the case of receiving a second Nobel Prize following the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, and was the first woman Nobel laureate and the first person to win in multiple categories.
1918 Fritz Haber: Development of the ammonia synthesis process (Haber-Bosch process). It revolutionized fertilizer production, but he is also a subject of controversy due to his involvement in chemical weapons development during World War I.
1954 Linus Pauling: Elucidation of the nature of the chemical bond. Pauling also won the Peace Prize in 1962, becoming a laureate in multiple categories.
1993 Kary Mullis: Invention of polymerase chain reaction (PCR). It is an achievement that transformed the life sciences as a whole.
2018 Frances Arnold, George Smith, Gregory Winter: Directed evolution of enzymes, phage display, and antibody technology
2020 Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jennifer Doudna: Development of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology
2022 Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal, Barry Sharpless: Bioorthogonal chemistry and click chemistry

Relation to Korea

Korea has not yet produced a Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate, but since the 2010s it has been producing world-class research results in applied chemistry fields such as semiconductor materials, batteries, catalysts, and nanomaterials. Domestic chemists mentioned as Nobel candidates continue to appear, and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Seoul National University, and the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) are cited as major research hubs.

Latest Trends

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to the fields of computational protein design and protein structure prediction. David Baker was recognized for methods to computationally design new proteins, while Demis Hassabis and John Jumper were recognized for developing the deep learning-based protein structure prediction model "AlphaFold." This symbolizes that artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to fundamentally reorganize chemical research, and it has been evaluated as having had a major impact on drug development and synthetic biology.

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yaghi for developing metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). MOFs are porous crystalline materials in which metal ions and organic molecules are regularly linked, and are used for gas storage and separation, moisture harvesting, catalysis, drug delivery, and more. In particular, the technology to collect water vapor from the air and convert it into water is drawing attention as an alternative for regions suffering from water scarcity.

Thus, recent Nobel Prizes in Chemistry tend to concentrate on research directly connected to solving human challenges such as computational science, AI, nanomaterials, and sustainability (climate, energy, water). In addition, the increasing proportion of women laureates and the growing number of multidisciplinary collaborative research forms are clear trends. In the future, catalysts for responding to climate change, artificial photosynthesis, battery materials, and quantum chemistry calculations are expected to be promising candidate fields for awards.