2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 4 October 2017.

The citation

The citation reads: "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution". They share the prize equally.

The laureates

Jacques Dubochet was born in 1942 in Aigle, Switzerland, and is affiliated with the University of Lausanne, Lausanne. Joachim Frank was born in 1940 in Siegen, Germany, and is affiliated with Columbia University, New York. Richard Henderson was born in 1945 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and is affiliated with the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge.

Why it matters

Cryo-electron microscopy freezes biological molecules so that their structure can be seen in fine detail. Henderson, born in Edinburgh, works at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

The prize

The prize is worth 9 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.