Has the chemistry Nobel prize really become the biology prize?
Researchers digging into the data call for honesty and transparency on how the prize has changed over the years
‘Not another chemistry Nobel going to biologists!’ How many times have you heard that complaint? But is there really anything in it?
It’s sometimes said that the number of chemistry prizes awarded to work rooted in the life sciences – at least nine of the prizes since 2000 – simply shows how broad chemistry is: at the molecular scale, biology is chemistry. But does that argument stack up? A historian of chemistry and a mathematical chemist argue in a new paper that, not only have the chemistry Nobels indeed become more biological in recent decades, but also the prizes of that nature tend to reward work outside of the chemical mainstream, being much more closely tied to research in the life sciences itself.