2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to John B. Fenn, Koichi Tanaka and Kurt Wüthrich. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 9 October 2002.

The citation

Half of the prize goes jointly to John B. Fenn and Koichi Tanaka "for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules". Half of the prize goes to Kurt Wüthrich "for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution".

The laureates

John B. Fenn was born in 1917 in New York, the United States, and is affiliated with Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. Koichi Tanaka was born in 1959 in Toyama City, Japan, and is affiliated with Shimadzu Corp., Kyoto. Kurt Wüthrich was born in 1938 in Aarberg, Switzerland, and is affiliated with Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Zurich and The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla.

Why it matters

Their methods allow scientists to weigh and map large biological molecules such as proteins. Tanaka, a company engineer rather than an academic, was a surprise winner.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.