Nobel Prize In Chemistry To Be Announced In Stockholm On Wednesday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 09th October, 2019) Winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be announced in Royal Swedish academy of Sciences in Stockholm during a ceremony that will start at 09:45 a.m. GMT on Wednesday.

This week will see the coveted prize handed out to laureates in the fields of chemistry, economy, and peace. The Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded on Monday to scientists for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability. On Tuesday, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to US-Canadian cosmologist James Peebles and Swiss scientists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for "theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology" and "the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star."

Last year, the chemistry prize was awarded to Frances H. Arnold and, for a separate project, to George P. Smith and Sir Gregory P. Winter jointly. Arnold was awarded the prize "for the directed evolution of enzymes," while Smith and Winter � "for the phage display of peptides and antibodies."

Nominees are not disclosed for 50 years after the award, so predicting the winners has become a sport of its own among forecasters and bookmakers.

The leader among them is Clarivate Analytics group, which makes predictions based on the amount of times a scientist was cited in academic papers among other factors.

Among the front-runners for the chemistry award are German chemist Rolf Huisgen and Danish scientist Morten Meldal. Huisgen discovered a reaction, allowing to obtain triazole � compounds used in creation of a variety of practically important substances, including different drugs. Meldal, in turn, showed that the reaction, discovered by Huisgen, could take place in simple conditions, at a room temperature and almost without any by-products.

The Nobel Prize committee has been awarding achievements since 1901, in accordance with the will of Swedish dynamite tycoon Alfred Nobel. His drive to promote the sciences and advancement of humanity came after he saw his seminal invention, dynamite, used as a tool of war instead of its original intended purpose of mining. The prize fund for the award, about $900,000 per award, is still primarily funded the fortune he left behind.