The 2017 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Jacques Dubochet (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), Joachim Frank (Columbia University, New York, USA) and Richard Henderson (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK) "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution," the academy said in a statement on Wednesday.
The following are biographies of the three Nobel Prize winners.
The Swiss scientist was born on June 8, 1942 in the western town of Aigle.
In 1967, he graduated from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and in 1969 received a Certificate of Molecular Biology in Geneva.
In 1969-1974, the scientist worked in Geneva and Basel and in 1973 defended a thesis in biophysics.
In 1974-1978, he worked in the Basel University and paid a number of visits to the United States, namely to Baltimore, Chicago and Los Angeles.
In 1978-1987, he was a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Germany's Heidelberg. He was engaged in the development of the cryo-electron microscopy and research of virus structure, DNA and chromatin (macromolecules in cells that consist of DNA, RNA and protein).
Since September 1987, he has been working at the University of Lausanne, where he was the head of the Department of Ultrastructural Analysis and the director of the Centre for electron microscopy (CME) and of the Laboratory for ultrastructural analysis (LAU).
In 1998-2002, he was the president of the section of biology, where he had also researched DNA, chromatin and cell nucleus.
Joachim Frank
In school he was enthusiastic about physics and continued his education at the University of Freiburg and at the University of Munich.
In 1970 he defended a thesis about the use of a cross-correlation method for alignment of carbon films.
Over the next two years, he worked in several laboratories in the United States, such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and at the University of California, Berkeley. The scientist also worked at Cornell University, as well as at Cambridge University.
In 2006 he was elected to the American Academy of Art and to the American Academy of Microbiology and joined the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
At the moment he is a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics and of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, New York.
Frank is an author of more than 200 publications and six books, he also writes poems and short stories.
Richard Henderson
Henderson was born on July 19, 1945, in Edinburgh.
In 1969-1970 he worked at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.
In 1970-1973 he worked at the Yale University in the United States.
Since 1973, he has been working in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, where he has initially been a member of research staff, but was later promoted several times and became its director in 1996 and headed it for 10 years. Since 2006, he is the program leader in the laboratory.
The scientist has contributed to research of protein structures using X-ray crystallography.
The scientist is a fellow of the Royal Society, a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a foreign associate of the US NAS.
Meanwhile, the Nobel prize in Chemistry is the third of those being announced this year. The Royal Swedish Academy has already awarded prizes in physics and medicine. Three US scientists won the Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday for the discovery of gravitational waves. A day before that three American scientists received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research on the work of internal biological clocks in organisms. The Nobel Prize Award Ceremony will be held traditionally on December 10. In 2017, each Nobel Prize winner gets nine million Swedish crowns, (approximately $1 million).
