Swedish Academy of Sciences

Another event that stands out in my memory was the Nobel Lecture I gave before the Swedish Academy of Sciences, chaired by Professor Kerstin Fredga, its President and the leading Swedish space scientist. She is the daughter of the late Arne Fredga, a chemistry professor and long-time member of the Nobel Committee and the Nobel Fonndation. I had known him and visited him in Uppsala years before thus it was even more of a personal pleasure to meet his daughter. The only formal... 

Nobel lecture, Stockholm, December 1994, with Professor Fredga, President, Royal Swedish Academy of Science... 

Figure 12.15 Schematic arrangement of the photosynthetic pigments in the reaction center of Rhodopseudomonas viridis. The twofold symmetry axis that relates the L and the M subunits is aligned vertically in the plane of the paper. Electron transfer proceeds preferentially along the branch to the right. The periplasmic side of the membrane is near the top, and the cytoplasmic side is near the bottom of the structure. (From B. Furugren, courtesy of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science.)...

When the question of the award of a Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of nuclear fission arose at the end of World War II, it was complicated by the fact that both Hahn and Strassmann were chemists. Another complication was that the Nobel Prize Committee had always considered radioactivity and radioactive atoms the responsibility of their chem-istiy committee—despite the fact that the discovery of fission had been interdisciplinai y from beginning to end. The Swedish Academy of Science was divided on whether the Chemistry Prize should be given jointly to Hahn and Meitner, or to Hahn alone. Finally they decided by a close vote to give the 1945 chemistry prize solely to Otto Hahn. 

Fig. 35. The surroundings of Cu2+ and Nb(0,F)6 octahedrons in the crystal structure of CuNbO F. Ends of the bold and thin lines correspond to metals positioned at Z 0.75 and Z-0.25. Reproduced from [222], M. Lmdberg, O. Savborg, Chem. Scripta 13 (1978-79) 197, Copyright 1979, with permission of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

See brochure of Nobel Committees for Physics and Chemistry, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, List of the Nobel Prize Laureates 1901-1994, Alm-quist Wiksell Tryckeri Uppsala, Sweden, 1995. 

Fig. 11-3 Direct atmospheric measurements of the CO2 concentration (left-hand scale) at Mauna Loa (Hawaii) and the South Pole station (Keeling et al., 1995) together with the concurrently observed decrease in atmospheric oxygen content (right-hand scale) at La Jolla, CA after 1989. (Taken from Heimann (1997) with permission from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.)...

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1905 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer... 

Fig. 3.7 Jons Jacob Berzelius (1779-1848), professor of chemistry in Stockholm and discoverer of the elements selenium, silicon, thorium and zirconium. He introduced the modem chemical symbols and also the term organic chemistry . From the book Berzelius, Europaresendren by C. G. Bernhard with kind permission of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences...

In 1967, Bengt Lindberg was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and was a member of the Nobel committee for chemistry between 1974 and 1987. He presented the prize winners of 1979 (Herbert Brown and Georg Wittig) and the prize winner of 1984 (Bruce Merrifield). He received a number of Swedish awards for his scientific contributions, including the Celsius medal (1985). He was awarded the Haworth Memorial Medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry (1981) and was the first non-American to receive the Hudson Award from the American Chemical Society (1983). 

We are grateful to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR Grants 05-02-97713, 05-02-17248) for support. 

For a brief life of this brilliant man, try the Web page of the Swedish Academy of Science, who awarded him two Nobel prizes go to http //www.nobel.se/chemistry/ laureates/1954/pauling-bio.html. Alternatively, his authorized biography, Linus Pauling, is by Anthony Serafini, Paragon House, 1991. 

To my knowledge, this was the hrst time the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, with the preceding statement, extended the existence of a tight connection between Science and Ethics. For the sake of correctness, however, the 2001 Nobel laureates in chemistry (Knowles, Noyori, and Sharpless) came from the area of green chemistry. Their awards were for the new chiral syntheses in green manufacture and the discovery of improved clean ways to produce pharmaceuticals, an industry that is still one of the highest polluters. 

Fig. 2.20. High resolution photoelectron spectrum of O2, showing overlapping vibrational progressions from transitions to different electronic states of the ion (range of IE not shown). Reproduced from Ref. [88] with permission. Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1970.

The year 2002 was an extraordinary year for liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC/MS) practitioners. On October 9, 2002, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences annonnced their decision to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to John B. Fenn, Koichi Tanaka, and Kurt Wiithrich for their development of analytical methods for the identification and structnral analysis of biological macromolecnles. Fenn and Tanaka shared the prize for developing electrospray and soft-laser desorption, respectively. These soft-ionization techniqnes allow macromolecules to be ionized withont fragmentation. 

This project was supported by the Swedish Research Council. XD Zou is a Research Fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences supported by a grant from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Prof Walter Kohn and Prof John A. Pople. The Laureates have each made pioneering contributions in developing methods that can be... 

Scheele worked obsessively in his laboratory, making one discovery after another and his discoveries attracted attention. He was elected to the Swedish Academy of Sciences at the age of 32, and he later received offers of professorships from many important universities. However, Scheele preferred to remain a provincial apothecary working undisturbed in his laboratory. 

From Bugge with permission of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. 

Kihlborg, L. (1979). Nobel Symposium 47 Direct Imaging of Atoms in Crystals and Molecules. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm. 

ESI-MS (Table 2.8) was introduced by Yamashita and Fenn in 1984, and this invention was recognized by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences with the award of The Nobel... 

In bis eulogy, A. F. Cronstedt told the members of the Swedish Academy of Sciences how Scheffer became interested in platinum In his time, said Cronstedt, a new metal happened to be discovered, which had evidently not been found in two thousand years, and it was most fitting that the first investigation of such a rare substance should fall to this man who was worthy of it,... 

On April 18, 1821, he was elected to membership in the Swedish Academy of Sciences. In the same year he published some analyses of cyanite from St. Gotthard and Roras and nepheline and sodalite from Vesuvius (13). In 1822 he published analyses of cinnamon stone, chrysoberyl, and boracite (14). He found the cinnamon stone which Berzelius had brought back from Vermland to be a calcium aluminum iron silicate and regarded it as a true garnet like the one from Ceylon which Klaproth had analyzed. 

A. G. Ekstrand, in his biography of Nilson written for the Swedish Academy of Sciences, expressed admiration that A person can work with chemicals and chemical apparatus in such a neat and truly elegant manner as he does. In the laboratory at Upsala, where I worked beside him for many years, I cannot recall ever having seen him in a laboratory coat (34). Ekstrand described Nilson as a practical chemist, not much given to theorizing. 

It should be stressed that this inquiry about the fate of the pioneers of free radical chemistry in the hands of the Nobel committee is based solely on a search of the Nobel Archive of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, Sweden. Although in principle no other written material, such as letters exchanged between committee members, should exist outside the archives (Section 8 in the Special Regulations at that time stated The proceedings, verdicts and proposals of the Nobel-Committees with reference to the prize-distribution shall not be published or in any other way be made known , much later to be replaced by the rule that the Nobel Archive should be made available for research of material fifty years old), it cannot be dismissed that such material with relation to free radical chemistry may possibly be found. The many references to correspondence between commit-... 

Academy Report. (1916). General report from the Nobel Committee for Chemistry to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In Minutes concerning... 

Nobel Symp., 47, ed. L. Kihlborg, Royal Swedish Academy of Science, 1979 also D. J. Smith in Chemistry and Physics of Solid Surfaces VI, 413, Springer, Berlin, 1986. 

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