List of 188 Nobel Prize Winners for Chemistry

(Last Updated On: October 6, 2021)

Do you know about the Nobel Prize winners in chemistry? The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (Swedish: Nobelpriset I kemi) to scientists in various disciplines of chemistry every year. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes created by Alfred Nobel’s will, which was written in 1895 and died in 1896. Outstanding achievements in chemistry, physics, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine are recognized with these awards.

The Nobel Prize is administered by the Nobel Foundation and presented by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, as stipulated by Nobel’s will. Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff of the Netherlands received the first Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1901, Nobel Prize winners in chemistry. Each winner receives a medal, a certificate, and a monetary award reward, which has changed throughout time. Van ‘t Hoff was awarded 150,782 SEK in 1901, which is equivalent to 7,731,004 SEK in December 2007. On the 10th of December, the anniversary of the Nobel’s death, the prize is awarded in Stockholm during a ceremony.

More Nobel Laureates have been awarded for contributions to organic chemistry than any other branch of science, with at least 25 laureates. Richard Kuhn (1938) and Adolf Butenandt (1939), both German Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, was denied permission to accept the award by their governments. They would get a medal and a certificate later, but not the money, Nobel Prize winners in chemistry. Frederick Sanger is one of only two Nobel Laureates to win the prize in the same field twice, in 1958 and 1980. The other is John Bardeen, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 and 1972.

Maria Skodowska-Curie (physics in 1903, chemistry in 1911) and Linus Pauling (physics in 1903, chemistry in 1911) are two others who have received the Nobel Prize twice, once in chemistry and once in another discipline (chemistry in 1954, peace in 1962). Maria Skodowska-Curie, Irène Joliot-Curie (1935), Dorothy Hodgkin (1964), Ada Yonath (2009), Frances Arnold (2018), Emmanuelle Charpentier (2020), and Jennifer Doudna are among the 188 people who have received the prize as of 2021, Nobel Prize winners in chemistry. Benjamin List and David McMillan won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2021 for developing asymmetric organocatalysis.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has not been given for the past eight years (1916, 1917, 1919, 1924, 1933, 1940-42). There were nine years in which the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was postponed by a year, Nobel Prize winners in chemistry. The Nobel Committee for Chemistry concluded that none of the nominees for that year satisfied the qualifying requirements, therefore the prize was not given in 1914, but it was granted to Theodore William Richards in 1915 and recognized as the 1914 prize.

The 1918 prize was awarded to Fritz Haber in 1919, the 1920 prize was awarded to Walther Nernst in 1921, the 1921 prize was awarded to Frederick Soddy in 1922, the 1925 prize was awarded to Richard Zsigmondy in 1926, the 1927 prize was awarded to Heinrich Otto Wieland in 1928, the 1938 prize was awarded to Richard Kuhn in 1939, the 1943 prize was awarded to George de Hevesy in 1944, and the 1927 prize was awarded to Heinrich Ott, Nobel Prize winners in chemistry.

According to Ioannidis et al., half of the Nobel Prizes in Science given between 1995 and 2017 were concentrated in a few fields. Along with particle physics, areas such as cell biology, atomic physics, and neuroscience have dominated the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recent decades. However, such subjects are interdisciplinary and have received Nobel Prizes in other fields. Molecular chemistry has received more Nobel Prizes for Chemistry than the other fields, accounting for 5.3% of all Nobel Prizes in science.

Nobel Prize Winners Chemistry

Year	Image	Laureate	Country	Rationale
1901		Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff	Netherlands	“[for his] discovery of the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions”
1902		Hermann Emil Fischer	Germany	“[for] his work on sugar and purine syntheses”
1903		Svante August Arrhenius	Sweden	“[for] his electrolytic theory of dissociation”
1904		Sir William Ramsay	United Kingdom	“[for his] discovery of the inert gaseous elements in the air, and his determination of their place in the periodic system”
1905		Adolf von Baeyer	Germany	“[for] the advancement of organic chemistry and the chemical industry, through his work on organic dyes and hydroaromatic compounds”
1906		Henri Moissan	France	“[for his] investigation and isolation of the element fluorine, and for [the] electric furnace called after him”
1907		Eduard Buchner	Germany	“for his biochemical researches and his discovery of cell-free fermentation”
1908		Ernest Rutherford	United Kingdom New Zealand	“for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances”
1909		Wilhelm Ostwald	Germany	“[for] his work on catalysis and for his investigations into the fundamental principles governing chemical equilibria and rates of reaction”
1910		Otto Wallach	Germany	“[for] his services to organic chemistry and the chemical industry by his pioneer work in the field of alicyclic compounds”
1911		Maria Skłodowska-Curie	Poland ( Russian Empire) France	“[for] the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element”
1912		Victor Grignard	France	“for the discovery of the […] Grignard reagent”
1912		Paul Sabatier	France	“for his method of hydrogenating organic compounds in the presence of finely disintegrated metals”
1913		Alfred Werner	Switzerland	“[for] his work on the linkage of atoms in molecules […] especially in inorganic chemistry”
1914		Theodore William Richards	United States	“[for] his accurate determinations of the atomic weight of a large number of chemical elements”
1915		Richard Martin Willstätter	Germany	“for his researches on plant pigments, especially chlorophyll”
1916	Not awarded
1917	Not awarded
1918		Fritz Haber	Germany	“for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements”
1919	Not awarded
1920		Walther Hermann Nernst	Germany	“[for] his work in thermochemistry”
1921		Frederick Soddy	United Kingdom	“for his contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of radioactive substances, and his investigations into the origin and nature of isotopes”
1922		Francis William Aston	United Kingdom	“for his discovery, by means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes, in a large number of non-radioactive elements, and for his enunciation of the whole-number rule”
1923		Fritz Pregl	Austria Kingdom of Yugoslavia	“for his invention of the method of micro-analysis of organic substances”
1924	Not awarded
1925		Richard Adolf Zsigmondy	Germany Hungary	“for his demonstration of the heterogeneous nature of colloid solutions and for the methods he used”
1926		The (Theodor) Svedberg	Sweden	“for his work on disperse systems”
1927		Heinrich Otto Wieland	Germany	“for his investigations of the constitution of the bile acids and related substances”
1928		Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus	Germany	“[for] his research into the constitution of the sterols and their connection with the vitamins”
1929		Arthur Harden	United Kingdom	“for their investigations on the fermentation of sugar and fermentative enzymes”
1929		Hans Karl August Simon von Euler-Chelpin	Sweden Germany
1930		Hans Fischer	Germany	“for his researches into the constitution of haemin and chlorophyll and especially for his synthesis of haemin”
1931		Carl Bosch	Germany	“[for] their contributions to the invention and development of chemical high pressure methods”
1931		Friedrich Bergius	Germany
1932		Irving Langmuir	United States	“for his discoveries and investigations in surface chemistry”
1933	Not awarded
1934		Harold Clayton Urey	United States	“for his discovery of heavy hydrogen”
1935		Frédéric Joliot	France	“[for] their synthesis of new radioactive elements”
1935		Irène Joliot-Curie	France	“[for] their synthesis of new radioactive elements”
1936		Peter Debye	Netherlands	“[for his work on] molecular structure through his investigations on dipole moments and the diffraction of X-rays and electrons in gases”
1937		Walter Norman Haworth	United Kingdom	“for his investigations on carbohydrates and vitamin C”
1937		Paul Karrer	Switzerland	“for his investigations on carotenoids, flavins and vitamins A and B₂“
1938		Richard Kuhn	Germany	“for his work on carotenoids and vitamins”
1939		Adolf Friedrich Johann Butenandt	Germany	“for his work on sex hormones”
1939		Leopold Ruzicka	Kingdom of Yugoslavia Switzerland	“for his work on polymethylenes and higher terpenes”
1940	Not awarded
1941
1942
1943		George de Hevesy	Hungary	“for his work on the use of isotopes as tracers in the study of chemical processes”
1944		Otto Hahn	Germany	“for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei”
1945		Artturi Ilmari Virtanen	Finland	“for his research and inventions in agricultural and nutrition chemistry, especially for his fodder preservation method”
1946		James Batcheller Sumner	United States	“for his discovery that enzymes can be crystallized”
		John Howard Northrop	United States	“for their preparation of enzymes and virus proteins in a pure form”
		Wendell Meredith Stanley	United States
1947		Sir Robert Robinson	United Kingdom	“for his investigations on plant products of biological importance, especially the alkaloids”
1948		Arne Wilhelm Kaurin Tiselius	Sweden	“for his research on electrophoresis and adsorption analysis, especially for his discoveries concerning the complex nature of the serum proteins”
1949		William Francis Giauque	United States	“for his contributions in the field of chemical thermodynamics, particularly concerning the behaviour of substances at extremely low temperatures”
1950		Otto Paul Hermann Diels	West Germany	“for their discovery and development of the diene synthesis”
1950		Kurt Alder	West Germany
1951		Edwin Mattison McMillan	United States	“for their discoveries in the chemistry of transuranium elements”
1951		Glenn Theodore Seaborg	United States
1952		Archer John Porter Martin	United Kingdom	“for their invention of partition chromatography”
1952		Richard Laurence Millington Synge	United Kingdom	“for their invention of partition chromatography”
1953		Hermann Staudinger	West Germany	“for his discoveries in the field of macromolecular chemistry”
1954		Linus Pauling	United States	“for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances”
1955		Vincent du Vigneaud	United States	“for his work on biochemically important sulphur compounds, especially for the first synthesis of a polypeptide hormone”
1956		Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood	United Kingdom	“for their researches into the mechanism of chemical reactions”
1956		Nikolay Nikolaevich Semenov	Soviet Union
1957		Lord (Alexander R.) Todd	United Kingdom	“for his work on nucleotides and nucleotide co-enzymes”
1958		Frederick Sanger	United Kingdom	“for his work on the structure of proteins, especially that of insulin”
1959		Jaroslav Heyrovský	Czechoslovakia	“for his discovery and development of the polarographic methods of analysis”
1960		Willard Frank Libby	United States	“for his method to use carbon-14 for age determination in archaeology, geology, geophysics, and other branches of science”
1961		Melvin Calvin	United States	“for his research on the carbon dioxide assimilation in plants”
1962		Max Ferdinand Perutz	United Kingdom	“for their studies of the structures of globular proteins”
1962		John Cowdery Kendrew	United Kingdom	“for their studies of the structures of globular proteins”
1963		Karl Ziegler	West Germany	“for their discoveries in the field of the chemistry and technology of high polymers”
1963		Giulio Natta	Italy
1964		Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin	United Kingdom	“for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances”
1965		Robert Burns Woodward	United States	“for his outstanding achievements in the art of organic synthesis”
1966		Robert S. Mulliken	United States	“for his fundamental work concerning chemical bonds and the electronic structure of molecules by the molecular orbital method”
1967		Manfred Eigen	West Germany	“for their studies of extremely fast chemical reactions, effected by disturbing the equilibrium by means of very short pulses of energy”
		Ronald George Wreyford Norrish	United Kingdom
		George Porter	United Kingdom
1968		Lars Onsager	United States Norway	“for the discovery of the reciprocal relations bearing his name, which are fundamental for the thermodynamics of irreversible processes”
1969		Derek H. R. Barton	United Kingdom	“for their contributions to the development of the concept of conformation and its application in chemistry”
1969		Odd Hassel	Norway
1970		Luis F. Leloir	Argentina	“for his discovery of sugar nucleotides and their role in the biosynthesis of carbohydrates”
1971		Gerhard Herzberg	Canada West Germany	“for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals”
1972		Christian B. Anfinsen	United States	“for his work on ribonuclease, especially concerning the connection between the amino acid sequence and the biologically active conformation”
		Stanford Moore	United States	“for their contribution to the understanding of the connection between chemical structure and catalytic activity of the active centre of the ribonuclease molecule”
		William H. Stein	United States
1973		Ernst Otto Fischer	West Germany	“for their pioneering work, performed independently, on the chemistry of the organometallic, so called sandwich compounds”
1973		Geoffrey Wilkinson	United Kingdom
1974		Paul J. Flory	United States	“for his fundamental work, both theoretical and experimental, in the physical chemistry of macromolecules”
1975		John Warcup Cornforth	Australia United Kingdom	“for his work on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalyzed reactions”
1975		Vladimir Prelog	Yugoslavia Switzerland	“for his research into the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions”
1976		William N. Lipscomb	United States	“for his studies on the structure of boranes illuminating problems of chemical bonding”
1977		Ilya Prigogine	Belgium	“for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures”
1978		Peter D. Mitchell	United Kingdom	“for his contribution to the understanding of biological energy transfer through the formulation of the chemiosmotic theory”
1979		Herbert C. Brown	United States	“for their development of the use of boron- and phosphorus-containing compounds, respectively, into important reagents in organic synthesis”
1979		Georg Wittig	West Germany
1980		Paul Berg	United States	“for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant-DNA”
		Walter Gilbert	United States	“for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids”
		Frederick Sanger	United Kingdom
1981		Kenichi Fukui	Japan	“for their theories, developed independently, concerning the course of chemical reactions”
1981		Roald Hoffmann	United States Poland
1982		Aaron Klug	United Kingdom	“for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes”
1983		Henry Taube	United States	“for his work on the mechanisms of electron transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes”
1984		Robert Bruce Merrifield	United States	“for his development of methodology for chemical synthesis on a solid matrix”
1985		Herbert A. Hauptman	United States	“for their outstanding achievements in developing direct methods for the determination of crystal structures”
1985		Jerome Karle	United States
1986		Dudley R. Herschbach	United States	“for their contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes”
		Yuan T. Lee	United States Taiwan
		John C. Polanyi	Canada Hungary
1987		Donald J. Cram	United States	“for their development and use of molecules with structure-specific interactions of high selectivity”
		Jean-Marie Lehn	France
		Charles J. Pedersen	United States
1988		Johann Deisenhofer	West Germany	“for their determination of the three-dimensional structure of a photosynthetic reaction centre”
		Robert Huber	West Germany
		Hartmut Michel	West Germany
1989		Sidney Altman	Canada United States	“for their discovery of catalytic properties of RNA”
1989		Thomas Cech	United States	“for their discovery of catalytic properties of RNA”
1990		Elias James Corey	United States	“for his development of the theory and methodology of organic synthesis”
1991		Richard R. Ernst	Switzerland	“for his contributions to the development of the methodology of high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy”
1992		Rudolph A. Marcus	United States Canada	“for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems”
1993		Kary B. Mullis	United States	“for contributions to the developments of methods within DNA-based chemistry […] for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method”
1993		Michael Smith	Canada	“for contributions to the developments of methods within DNA-based chemistry […] for his fundamental contributions to the establishment of oligonucleotide-based, site-directed mutagenesis and its development for protein studies”
1994		George A. Olah	United States Hungary	“for his contribution to carbocation chemistry”
1995		Paul J. Crutzen	Netherlands	“for their work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone”
		Mario J. Molina	Mexico
		F. Sherwood Rowland	United States
1996		Robert F. Curl Jr.	United States	“for their discovery of fullerenes”
		Sir Harold W. Kroto	United Kingdom
		Richard E. Smalley	United States
1997		Paul D. Boyer	United States	“for their elucidation of the enzymatic mechanism underlying the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)”
		John E. Walker	United Kingdom
		Jens C. Skou	Denmark	“for the first discovery of an ion-transporting enzyme, Na⁺, K⁺ -ATPase”
1998		Walter Kohn	United States	“for his development of the density-functional theory”
1998		John A. Pople	United Kingdom	“for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry”
1999		Ahmed Zewail	United States Egypt	“for his studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy”
2000		Alan J. Heeger	United States	“for their discovery and development of conductive polymers”
		Alan G. MacDiarmid	United States New Zealand
		Hideki Shirakawa	Japan
2001		William S. Knowles	United States	“for their work on chirally catalysed hydrogenation reactions”
		Ryōji Noyori	Japan
		K. Barry Sharpless	United States	“for his work on chirally catalysed oxidation reactions”
2002		John B. Fenn	United States	“for the development of methods for identification and structure analyses of biological macromolecules […] for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules”
		Koichi Tanaka	Japan
		Kurt Wüthrich	Switzerland	“for the development of methods for identification and structure analyses of biological macromolecules […] for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution”
2003		Peter Agre	United States	“for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes […] for the discovery of water channels”
2003		Roderick MacKinnon	United States	“for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes […] for structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels”
2004		Aaron Ciechanover	Israel	“for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation”
		Avram Hershko	Israel
		Irwin Rose	United States
2005		Yves Chauvin	France	“for the development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis”
		Robert H. Grubbs	United States
		Richard R. Schrock	United States
2006		Roger D. Kornberg	United States	“for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription”
2007		Gerhard Ertl	Germany	“for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces”
2008		Osamu Shimomura	Japan^[109]	“for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP”
		Martin Chalfie	United States
		Roger Y. Tsien	United States
2009		Venkatraman Ramakrishnan	United States India United Kingdom	“for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”
		Thomas A. Steitz	United States
		Ada E. Yonath	Israel
2010		Richard F. Heck	United States	“for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis”
		Ei-ichi Negishi	Japan
		Akira Suzuki	Japan
2011		Dan Shechtman	Israel United States	“for the discovery of quasicrystals”
2012		Robert Lefkowitz	United States	“for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors”
2012		Brian Kobilka	United States	“for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors”
2013		Martin Karplus	United States Austria	“for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems”
		Michael Levitt	United States United Kingdom Israel^[116]
		Arieh Warshel	United States Israel
2014		Eric Betzig	United States	“for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”
		Stefan W. Hell	Germany Romania^[118]
		William E. Moerner	United States
2015		Tomas Lindahl	Sweden United Kingdom	“for mechanistic studies of DNA repair”
		Paul L. Modrich	United States
		Aziz Sancar	United States Turkey
2016		Jean-Pierre Sauvage	France	“for the design and synthesis of molecular machines”
		Fraser Stoddart	United Kingdom United States
		Ben Feringa	Netherlands
2017		Jacques Dubochet	Switzerland	“for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution”
		Joachim Frank	Germany United States^[122]
		Richard Henderson	United Kingdom
2018		Frances Arnold	United States	“for the directed evolution of enzymes”
		George Smith	United States	“for the phage display of peptides and antibodies”
		Sir Gregory Winter	United Kingdom	“for the phage display of peptides and antibodies”
2019		John B. Goodenough	United States	“for the development of lithium ion batteries”
		M. Stanley Whittingham	United Kingdom United States
		Akira Yoshino	Japan
2020		Emmanuelle Charpentier	France	“for the development of a method for genome editing”
2020		Jennifer Doudna	United States	“for the development of a method for genome editing”
2021		Benjamin List	Germany	“for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis”
2021		David MacMillan	United Kingdom	“for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis”