From: John Kerkines (jkerk$##$arnold.chem.uoa.gr)
Date: Fri Oct 08 1999 - 11:20:28 EDT
Forthcoming Tuesday is Nobel Prize day for Chemistry.
By observing the trends in the way the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, one would
see that Analytical and Organic Chemistry haven't seen a Nobel Prize for
some years.
The last Nobel Prize in "Analytical" Chemistry was given in 1991 to
Richard Ernst for high resolution NMR. In the 80's three Nobels were given
for analytical-crystallographic-related work (1982, Sir A. Klug, 1985
Hauptman and Karle, 1988 Deisenhofer, Huber and Michel).
If we do not count the 1996 prize for fullerenes as "organic" chemistry,
George Olah's 1994 prize for carbocations is the last Nobel Prize given to
an Organic Chemist. Organic-related Nobels in the past two decades include
1984 Merrifield, 1987 Cram, Lehn and Pedersen and 1990 Corey.
Since I am neither an organic, nor an analytical chemist, I am not able to
propose names of scientists in these fields who may have a chance in
winning a Nobel Prize. The past experience has shown that the last years
almost all of the laureates come from the USA, and at least one of them is
at a high-level University (MIT, Cornell, Caltech, Stanford, Harvard to
name a few). So, I would search for potential candidates in Analytical or
Organic Chemistry in these Universities.
There is always a chance for a "combination of fields" Nobel Prize. For
example A.Bax who is first in the list of citations is doing NMR in bio
systems (but probably he is too young for a Nobel Prize?). Another example
would be Dick Zare in the field of spectroscopy (he is in Stanford), and
S. Lippard in bioinorganic (he is in MIT).
Another thing, is the number or papers or citations. There are 5 Nobel
laureates among the first 30 cited chemists. Possibly there would be
another one soon. Almost 10 of the first 30 are theoreticians, so they are
eliminated since it is rare that the same field gets the Nobel Prize two
consecutive years. I checked out some of the people that remain. Some
names I found interesting were D. Seebach from ETH and K.C. Nicolaou from
Scripps in Organic, and A. Bard in Analytical. There are more of them of
course.
Since most of you are more aware than me with what's happening in organic
chemistry, if this year would be for organic chemistry, who would you
propose and why?
Regards,
John Kerkines
Ph.D. Student
University of Athens, Greece
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