2015 Yields Two Nobels For Chemistry

In some quarters of the chemical universe these days, it’s become commonplace to complain about how Chemistry Nobel Prizes go to discoveries that seem more biology than chemistry. Is the central science overlooked? Not this year, that’s for sure. Chemistry got the Nobel nod twice last week. Three biochemists—Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, and Aziz Sancar—took home the Chemistry Nobel for revealing the inner workings of the repair systems that guard the integrity of our genomic DNA (see page 6). Each one of them spent years detailing the enzymatic mechanisms that protect our DNA from mistakes, chemical instability, and environmental insults. Meanwhile, the prize for medicine or physiology also went squarely to chemistry: Youyou Tu was recognized for leading the charge to isolate a game-changing malaria drug from a traditional Chinese herbal medicine during the height of China’s Cultural Revolution. She shared the prize with William Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura, who ...