BLOG - Chemistry

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Nobel Prize 2014: Lighting Nano

The recipients of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry turned micro- into nanoscopy.

Susanne Dambeck

One-Way Street Toward Interdisciplinarity?

For a successful interdisciplinary team – bring in some real experts!

Nadine Gärber

LNLM15 wants YOU!

The definitive guide on applying for LNLM15 as a young scientist.

Stephanie Hanel

Dorothy Hodgkin: The Queen of Crystallography

2014 marks the 50th anniversary of Dorothy Hodgkin’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry: memories of a Lindau ‘veteran’ who had already been a living legend when she participated in the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings.

Akshat Rathi

Interview with Hartmut Michel: on biofuels, Max Planck

Harmut Michel won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1988 “for the determination of the structure of a photosynthetic reaction centre”, which helped reveal details of one of nature’s most useful processes. In 2012, Michel wrote an editorial titled “The Nonsense of Biofuels” in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a leading chemistry journal. He argued that […]

Ashutosh Jogalekar

The quiet American

In conversation Brian Kobilka is shy, self-effacing, modest and mild-mannered. In his work he is a tour de force of science who has chipped away at an unyielding problem for more than twenty years until it gave way and got him the Nobel Prize. Kobilka and his fellow prizewinner Robert Lefkowitz were honored for their […]

Akshat Rathi

Nobel Prize-winning science from llamas to rejections

Brian Kobilka of Stanford University won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2012 for work on G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), which are main targets for making new drugs. GPCRs sit on cell walls and are involved in conveying chemical messages from outside the cell to the inside. If cells gets the message wrong, it may […]

Ashutosh Jogalekar

Avram Hershko’s lessons for doing good science

Avram Hershko – an amiable, mild-mannered Israeli biochemist – shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his co-discovery of the body’s protein waste disposal system along with Aaron Ciechanover and Irwin Rose. At Lindau Hershko delivered a succinct summary of the discovery of ubiquitin – a protein that essentially tags unwanted and defective proteins […]

Ashutosh Jogalekar

Steven Chu talks innovation, energy, climate change and awareness

Former Secretary of Energy and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu gave a wide-ranging and engaging talk at Lindau about science innovation and a realistic appraisal of problems. There were two main messages in his presentation: first, that scientific innovation has often thwarted doom and gloom prognostications, and second, that an accurate recognition of the nature of […]

Kathleen Raven

Imaging the near invisible with TEM: a master class

Though nanometer-level imaging has come far with transmission electron microscopy, Nobel Laureate Dan Shechtman (Nobel Prize 2011, Chemistry) warned his master class audience on Tuesday that today’s images will seem primitive a few years in the future. For now, the five students—all but one of them female—presented research at the edge of what this writer […]

Ashutosh Jogalekar

Supramolecular chemistry: Moving away from synthesis and toward design

The key goal of chemical science in the nineteenth and twentieth century was to understand how atoms come together to form molecules through chemical bonds. The focus was thus on understanding the covalent interactions that link atoms together, interactions that are made possible by the sharing of electrons. The theory of chemical bonding achieved its […]

Ashutosh Jogalekar

Brian and Bob’s GPCR symphony

Brian Kobilka and Robert Lefkowitz received the 2012 Nobel Prize in chemistry for telling us how the molecular musicians in living organisms play the tune of life. Almost any molecular mechanism in our body provides an illuminating example of a superbly choreographed ballet, but Kobilka and Lefkowitz shed light on the motions of one of […]