The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded 117 times since 1901, recognizing 200 laureates for discoveries ranging from the noble gases to CRISPR gene editing. This list covers every winner in chronological order, grouped by era, with the contribution that earned each one the prize.
Quick Facts
- First awarded: 1901, to Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff (Netherlands)
- Total laureates: 200 (198 individuals — Frederick Sanger and Barry Sharpless each won twice)
- Women laureates: 8, starting with Marie Curie in 1911
- Years not awarded: 1916, 1917, 1919, 1924, 1933, 1940, 1941, 1942 (mostly wartime years)
- Country with the most laureates: United States (83)
- Most recent winners (2025): Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi, for metal-organic frameworks
The Founding Years (1901–1915)
The first Nobel Chemistry prizes went almost entirely to the scientists building physical chemistry as its own discipline — reaction rates, equilibrium, electrolytes, and the first real understanding of what atoms and molecules were actually doing.
1901 – Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff
Recognized for: Laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions
1902 – Hermann Emil Fischer
Recognized for: Work on sugar and purine synthesis
1903 – Svante Arrhenius
Recognized for: Theory of electrolytic dissociation
1904 – William Ramsay
Recognized for: Discovery of the noble gases and their place in the periodic table
1905 – Adolf von Baeyer
Recognized for: Advances in organic dyes and hydroaromatic compounds
1906 – Henri Moissan
Recognized for: Isolation of fluorine and development of the electric furnace
1907 – Eduard Buchner
Recognized for: Discovery of cell-free fermentation
1908 – Ernest Rutherford
Recognized for: Investigations into the disintegration of elements and radioactive substances
1909 – Wilhelm Ostwald
Recognized for: Work on catalysis and chemical equilibrium
1910 – Otto Wallach
Recognized for: Pioneering work on terpenes
1911 – Marie Curie
Recognized for: Discovery of radium and polonium, and isolation of radium. Curie is the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences — Physics in 1903, Chemistry in 1911 — and the first woman to win any Nobel Prize.
1912 – Victor Grignard
Recognized for: The Grignard reagent
1912 – Paul Sabatier
Recognized for: Catalytic hydrogenation methods
1913 – Alfred Werner
Recognized for: Coordination theory of how atoms link inside molecules
1914 – Theodore Richards
Recognized for: Precise determination of atomic weights
1915 – Richard Willstätter
Recognized for: Research on plant pigments, especially chlorophyll
War, Recovery, and the Rise of Biochemistry (1916–1939)
World War I cancelled the prize twice, and the interwar years show chemistry splitting into new directions — radioactivity, vitamins, and the industrial-scale chemistry that fed and fueled the 20th century.
1916–1917 – Not awarded
1918 – Fritz Haber
Recognized for: Synthesis of ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen
1919 – Not awarded
1920 – Walther Nernst
Recognized for: Work in thermochemistry
1921 – Frederick Soddy
Recognized for: Chemistry of radioactive substances and the concept of isotopes
1922 – Francis Aston
Recognized for: Discovery of isotopes using the mass spectrograph
1923 – Fritz Pregl
Recognized for: Method of micro-analysis for organic substances
1924 – Not awarded
1925 – Richard Zsigmondy
Recognized for: Demonstrating the heterogeneous nature of colloid solutions
1926 – Theodore Svedberg
Recognized for: Work on disperse systems, using the ultracentrifuge
1927 – Heinrich Wieland
Recognized for: Research on the structure of bile acids
1928 – Adolf Windaus
Recognized for: Research on sterols and their connection to vitamins
1929 – Arthur Harden
Recognized for: Research on sugar fermentation and fermentative enzymes
1929 – Hans von Euler-Chelpin
Recognized for: Research on sugar fermentation and fermentative enzymes
1930 – Hans Fischer
Recognized for: Research on the structure of hemin and chlorophyll
1931 – Carl Bosch
Recognized for: High-pressure chemical methods, including the Haber-Bosch process
1931 – Friedrich Bergius
Recognized for: High-pressure chemical methods, including the Haber-Bosch process
1932 – Irving Langmuir
Recognized for: Discoveries in surface chemistry
1933 – Not awarded
1934 – Harold Urey
Recognized for: Discovery of deuterium (heavy hydrogen)
1935 – Frédéric Joliot
Recognized for: Synthesis of new radioactive elements
1935 – Irène Joliot-Curie
Recognized for: Synthesis of new radioactive elements. Marie Curie’s daughter, making the Curie family the only one with two generations of Nobel Chemistry laureates.
1936 – Peter Debye
Recognized for: Molecular structure via dipole moments and diffraction
1937 – Walter Haworth
Recognized for: Carbohydrates and vitamin C
1937 – Paul Karrer
Recognized for: Carotenoids and vitamins A and B2
1938 – Richard Kuhn
Recognized for: Work on carotenoids and vitamins
1939 – Adolf Butenandt | Leopold Ružička
Recognized for: Sex hormones
The Nobel Prize 1939 was divided. Adolf Butenandt received one half for his work on sex hormones and Leopold Ružička received the other half for his work on polymethylenes and higher terpenes
Nuclear Chemistry and the War Years (1940–1949)
The prize was suspended for three straight years during World War II. When it resumed, nuclear chemistry — fission, isotopes as tracers, and enzyme structure — dominated.
1940–1942 – Not awarded
1943 – George de Hevesy
Recognized for: Using isotopes as tracers in chemical research
1944 – Otto Hahn
Recognized for: Discovery of nuclear fission, directly enabling the later synthesis of every transuranium element on the periodic table.
1945 – Artturi Virtanen
Recognized for: Methods in agricultural and nutrition chemistry
1946 – James Sumner, John Northrop and Wendell Stanley
Recognized for: Proof that enzymes can be crystallized
1947 – Robert Robinson
Recognized for: Research on plant alkaloids and related biological compounds
1948 – Arne Tiselius
Recognized for: Electrophoresis and adsorption analysis
1949 – William Giauque
Recognized for: Chemical thermodynamics at extremely low temperatures
The Golden Age of Structural and Organic Chemistry (1950–1969)
This stretch produced some of the most recognizable names in 20th-century science — Pauling, Sanger, Hodgkin — as X-ray crystallography and spectroscopy let chemists finally see the molecules they’d been theorizing about for decades.
1950 – Otto Diels and Kurt Alder
Recognized for: The diene synthesis (Diels-Alder reaction)
1951 – Edwin McMillan and Glenn Seaborg
Recognized for: Chemistry of the transuranium elements.
Seaborg co-discovered ten transuranium elements over his career, more than anyone else in history — element 106, seaborgium, is named after him.
1952 – Archer Martin and Richard Synge
Recognized for: Invention of partition chromatography
1953 – Hermann Staudinger
Recognized for: Discoveries in macromolecular (polymer) chemistry
1954 – Linus Pauling
Recognized for: Research into the nature of the chemical bond
1955 – Vincent du Vigneaud
Recognized for: Sulphur-based biochemical compounds; first synthesis of a polypeptide hormone
1956 – Cyril Hinshelwood and Nikolay Semenov
Recognized for: Mechanisms of chemical reactions
1957 – Alexander Todd
Recognized for: Work on nucleotides and coenzymes
1958 – Frederick Sanger
Recognized for: Structure of proteins, especially insulin. Sanger later won a second Chemistry Nobel in 1980. One of only three people to win twice in the same category.
1959 – Jaroslav Heyrovský
Recognized for: Discovery and development of polarographic analysis
1960 – Willard Libby
Recognized for: Method for radiocarbon dating
1961 – Melvin Calvin
Recognized for: The carbon dioxide assimilation pathway in plants (Calvin cycle)
1962 – Max Perutz and John Kendrew
Recognized for: Structures of globular proteins
1963 – Karl Ziegler and Giulio Natta
Recognized for: Chemistry and technology of high polymers (Ziegler-Natta catalysts)
1964 – Dorothy Hodgkin
Recognized for: X-ray determination of important biochemical structures. Hodgkin remains the only British woman to win a Nobel Prize in any science.
1965 – Robert Woodward
Recognized for: Outstanding achievements in organic synthesis
1966 – Robert Mulliken
Recognized for: Chemical bonds and the electronic structure of molecules
1967 – Manfred Eigen, Ronald Norrish and George Porter
Recognized for: Studies of extremely fast chemical reactions
1968 – Lars Onsager
Recognized for: Reciprocal relations in irreversible thermodynamics
1969 – Derek Barton and Odd Hassel
Recognized for: The concept of molecular conformation
Chemistry Meets Biology (1970–1999)
By the 1970s, the line between chemistry and molecular biology had essentially disappeared. This era’s laureates gave the world DNA sequencing, PCR, recombinant DNA, and fullerenes.
1970 – Luis Leloir
Recognized for: Sugar nucleotides and their role in carbohydrate biosynthesis
1971 – Gerhard Herzberg
Recognized for: Electronic structure and geometry of molecules
1972 – Stanford Moore and William Stein | Christian Anfinsen
The Nobel Prize 1972 was divided. Stanford Moore and William H. Stein shared one half for identifying the chemical structure and catalytic action of the ribonuclease active site, including developing key analytical tools. Christian B. Anfinsen received the other half for demonstrating that an enzyme’s amino acid sequence determines its three-dimensional, active structure.
1973 – Ernst Fischer and Geoffrey Wilkinson
Recognized for: Chemistry of organometallic “sandwich” compounds
1974 – Paul Flory
Recognized for: Physical chemistry of macromolecules
1975 – John Cornforth and Vladimir Prelog
Recognized for: Stereochemistry of enzyme reactions
1976 – William Lipscomb
Recognized for: Structure of boranes
1977 – Ilya Prigogine
Recognized for: Non-equilibrium thermodynamics and dissipative structures
1978 – Peter Mitchell
Recognized for: Biological energy transfer (the chemiosmotic theory)
1979 – Herbert Brown and Georg Wittig
Recognized for: Boron-based reagents in organic synthesis
1980 – Paul Berg, Walter Gilbert and Frederick Sanger
Recognized for: Methods for sequencing DNA. It is Sanger’s second Chemistry Nobel, 22 years after his first.
1981 – Kenichi Fukui and Roald Hoffmann
Recognized for: Orbital symmetry theories of chemical reactions
1982 – Aaron Klug
Recognized for: Crystallographic electron microscopy of nucleic acid-protein complexes
1983 – Henry Taube
Recognized for: Mechanisms of electron transfer reactions
1984 – Robert Merrifield
Recognized for: Method for solid-phase peptide synthesis
1985 – Herbert Hauptman and Jerome Karle
Recognized for: Direct methods for determining crystal structures
1986 – Dudley Herschbach, Yuan Lee and John Polanyi
Recognized for: Dynamics of chemical elementary processes
1987 – Donald Cram, Jean-Marie Lehn and Charles Pedersen
Recognized for: Host-guest molecular recognition chemistry
1988 – Johann Deisenhofer, Robert Huber and Hartmut Michel
Recognized for: Structure of a photosynthetic reaction center
1989 – Sidney Altman and Thomas Cech
Recognized for: Catalytic properties of RNA
1990 – Elias Corey
Recognized for: Theory and methodology of organic synthesis
1991 – Richard Ernst
Recognized for: High-resolution NMR spectroscopy methods
1992 – Rudolph Marcus
Recognized for: Theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems
1993 – Kary Mullis and Michael Smith
Recognized for: Invention of PCR
1994 – George Olah
Recognized for: Carbocation chemistry
1995 – Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland
1996 – Robert Curl, Richard Smalley and Harold Kroto
Recognized for: Discovery of fullerenes
1997 – Paul Boyer, John Walker and Jens Skou
Recognized for: Enzymatic mechanism behind ATP synthesis
1998 – Walter Kohn
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1998 was divided, one half awarded to Walter Kohn for Density-functional theory, the other half to John Pople, recognized for Computational quantum chemistry methods.
1999 – Ahmed Zewail
Recognized for: Femtosecond chemistry — observing reactions in real time
The Modern Era — Chemistry, Computation, and Medicine Converge (2000–2025)
The 21st century prize increasingly rewards work sitting at the intersection of chemistry, computing, and medicine — gene editing, battery technology, and most recently, AI-driven protein design.
2000 – Alan Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa
Recognized for: Discovery and development of conductive polymers
2001 – William Knowles and Ryōji Noyori and K. Barry Sharpless
Recognized for: Chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions. Sharpless went on to win a rare second Chemistry Nobel in 2022.
2002 – John Fenn and Koichi Tanaka | Kurt Wüthrich
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2002 was divided, one half awarded jointly to John Fenn and Koichi Tanaka for Methods for identifying biological macromolecules, the other half to Kurt Wüthrich, recognized for the NMR for biomolecular structure.
2003 – Peter Agre, Roderick MacKinnon
Recognized for: Discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes
2004 – Aaron Ciechanover, Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose
Recognized for: Discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation
2005 – Yves Chauvin, Robert Grubbs and Richard Schrock
Recognized for: The metathesis method in organic synthesis
2006 – Roger Kornberg
Recognized for: Molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription
2007 – Gerhard Ertl
Recognized for: Chemical processes on solid surfaces
2008 – Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien
Recognized for: Discovery and development of green fluorescent protein (GFP)
2009 – Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath
Recognized for: Structure and function of the ribosome
2010 – Richard Heck , Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki
Recognized for: Palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions
2011 – Dan Shechtman
Recognized for: Discovery of quasicrystals
2012 – Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka
Recognized for: Studies of G-protein-coupled receptors
2013 – Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel
Recognized for: Multiscale computer models for complex chemical systems
2014 – Eric Betzig, William Moerner and Stefan Hell
Recognized for: Super-resolved fluorescence microscopy
2015 – Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar
Recognized for: Mechanistic studies of DNA repair
2016 – Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart and Ben Feringa
Recognized for: Design and synthesis of molecular machines
2017 – Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson
Recognized for: Cryo-electron microscopy for imaging biomolecules
2018 – Frances Arnold | George Smith and Gregory Winter
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018 was divided, one half awarded to Frances H. Arnold, recognized for the directed evolution of enzymes, the other half jointly to George P. Smith and Sir Gregory P. Winter for the phage display of peptides and antibodies.
2019 – John Goodenough, Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino
Recognized for: Development of the lithium-ion battery
2020 – Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna
Recognized for: Development of the CRISPR/Cas9 genome-editing method. The first all-women Chemistry Nobel team, just eight years after the technique was published.
2021 – Benjamin List and David MacMillan
Recognized for: Development of asymmetric organocatalysis
2022 – Carolyn Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless
Recognized for: Click chemistry and bioorthogonal reactions.
It is K. Barry Sharpless second Chemistry Nobel, 21 years after his first.
2023 – Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov
Recognized for: Discovery and synthesis of quantum dots
2024 – David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper
Recognized for: AI-driven protein structure prediction and design (AlphaFold)
2025 – Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi
Recognized for: Development of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)
Frequently Asked Questions
Who won the first Nobel Prize in Chemistry? Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff of the Netherlands won the first Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1901, for his work on chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions.
How many people have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry? As of 2025, 200 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry have been awarded to 198 individuals. Frederick Sanger and K. Barry Sharpless each won twice.
Has anyone won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry more than once? Yes. Frederick Sanger won in 1958 and 1980, and K. Barry Sharpless won in 2001 and 2022. Marie Curie also won twice, but in two different categories — Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911.
How many women have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry? Eight women have won, starting with Marie Curie in 1911 and most recently Carolyn Bertozzi (2022) and Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier (2020).
Which country has produced the most Nobel Chemistry laureates? The United States leads with 83 laureates, followed by the United Kingdom (36) and Germany (32).
In which years was the Nobel Prize in Chemistry not awarded? 1916, 1917, 1919, 1924, 1933, 1940, 1941, and 1942 — mostly years disrupted by the two World Wars.
Explore More
See exactly where these laureates’ discoveries sit on the interactive Periodic Table, or browse more historical figures on the People Timeline.
Further reading:
- The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
- Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
- Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie by Lauren Redniss
Cover image: Marie Curie in her lab. Photo by Nationaal Archief on Unsplash
