Who will win the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry?

In anticipation of next week’s announcement of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, we at C&EN are stocking up on coffee and adjusting our sleep schedules for watching the early-morning festivities in Stockholm. We’re also wildly speculating about which chemists will get the call from Sweden this year.

On Sept. 27, we held our annual predictions webinar entitled “Who Will Win the #ChemNobel? Predicting the 2017 Nobel Laureate(s) in Chemistry.” C&EN Deputy Editorial Director Lauren K. Wolf and Associate Multimedia Editor Matt Davenport led this hour-long discussion about the Nobels with three distinguished guests.

The panelists included Carmen Drahl, former C&EN staffer and current freelancer for outlets such as Forbes.com; Omar K. Farha, chemistry professor at Northwestern University and an editor with ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces; and Marie Heffern, chemistry professor at the University of California, Davis, and one of C&EN’s 2017 “Talented 12” rising stars in chemistry.

True to the webcast’s title, panelists and hosts made predictions about this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But they also discussed innovative fundamental science that has yet to find a “killer app” and scientists who might be considered “snubbed” if they don’t win the Nobel, and they fielded Nobel-inspired questions from viewers.

Viewers submitted queries to the panelists through the webinar platform and also via Twitter, using the hashtag #chemnobel. Although the webcast is over, we’re still taking predictions on Twitter accompanied by the hashtag. Please tag @cenmag, too.

During the webcast, viewers voted electronically for who they thought had the best shot at the 2017 prize, based on the panelists’ predictions. The majority of the votes went to John B. Goodenough and others who helped develop lithium-ion batteries, as well as to Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuel Charpentier, and Feng Zhang for pioneering CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology.

The predictions webinar is just one part of C&EN’s pre-Nobel coverage. Be sure to check out our story about women overlooked for the Nobel Prize and our conversation with Ben L. Feringa, one of the three molecular machine pioneers who took home the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year.

To see the entire back-and-forth between the webinar panelists and hosts, watch the archived predictions broadcast, embedded above.