Nobel journeys in chemistry: Mapping the lives of laureates

Chemistry’s 174 laureates—counting two-time winner Frederick Sanger only once—were born in 37 different countries according to today’s political boundaries. That number decreases to 19 countries when considering where the Nobel Laureates lived when they won.

Stanford University is the primary affiliation for seven Nobel Laureates at the time of their award, the largest number for a single institution. Harvard University and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology follow with six laureates each. However, as a system, the University of California is the primary affiliation of 13 laureates, and the various institutes of the Max Planck Society can claim 11.

Two laureates were without official affiliations when they won: Kary B. Mullis was between jobs, and William S. Knowles was retired. Mullis won the 1993 prize for inventing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and Knowles earned the 2001 prize for his work on hydrogenation reactions catalyzed by chiral transition-metal complexes.

The average age for a Chemistry Nobel Laureate is 58, with 57 being the median. The most common age for a laureate is 54.

Henri Moissan spent the least amount of time with his award, dying in February 1907, just two months after delivering his acceptance speech. Moissan won for isolating fluorine and for “the electric furnace called after him,” per the prize announcement. Adolf F. J. Butenandt held his award the longest: 56 years between 1940 and 1995. Butenandt earned his award for his studies of sex hormones, including his discovery of the composition of estrogen.

The average age for chemistry’s four female laureates is 52. Ada E. Yonath is the eldest of this group, winning her award at the age of 70 in 2009 for showing the structure of ribosomes through X-ray crystallography. The youngest is Irène Joliot-Curie, who was 38 when she won the 1935 prize for the first synthesis of radioactive elements.

The youngest scientist to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry is Frédéric Joliot, who earned his prize at 35 for his work with Irène Joliot-Curie in synthesizing radioactive elements. Joliot is also the first laureate born in the 20th century. Chemistry’s oldest laureate at the time of the award is John B. Fenn, who won at 85 in 2002 for developing mass spectrometry methods for analyzing large biomolecules. Fenn died on Dec. 10, 2010, exactly eight years after delivering his speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm.

Charles J. Pedersen is the only Nobel Laureate in Chemistry born in Korea. He was born to a Norwegian father and Japanese mother in 1904 in a town which would become Busan, South Korea. Pedersen grew up near the Unsan Mines in what is now North Korea, although the mines themselves were contractually controlled by U.S. interests. At the age of eight, Pedersen left Korea for Japan, where he would live until enrolling as an undergraduate at the University of Dayton in 1922. After earning a master’s degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pedersen secured a job at DuPont, where he discovered crown ethers in 1967 and earned his Nobel Prize 20 years later.

Chemistry’s sole laureate born in China is Ei-ichi Negishi, who was nevertheless born as a Japanese citizen. He and his family moved to Japan after World War II. Negishi moved to the U.S. in 1960 to work on his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. Negishi won for the palladium-catalyzed coupling reaction that bears his name.

Ernest Rutherford is the laureate who won the prize farthest from his birthplace, Nelson, New Zealand. Rutherford won the 1908 prize—for exposing fundamentals of radioactivity—while at Victoria University in Manchester, England, more than 18,000 km from Nelson.

Fourteen laureates won the prize within 10 km of where they were born. The most recent was Aaron Ciechanover, who won the 2004 prize in Haifa, Israel, for helping discover a protein-degradation process pivotal to human health.

Roughly one-third of all laureates (59 out of 174) won their prize in a country other than the one where they were born. Of those, most won in the U.S. (22), followed by Germany (11), and England (9).

As of Sept. 6, 2016, there are 58 living laureates.

The laureate who lived the longest is John W. Cornforth, who died at age 96, nearly 40 years after winning the 1975 award for his studies of enzymes. The living laureate who has held the award the longest is Manfred Eigen, who won in 1967 for using high-frequency sound waves to spur chemical processes. He is 89.