Selected Nobel Prizes in Molecular Biology


Official Nobel Prize Website


Chemistry 1958

The prize was awarded to:

"for his work on the structure of proteins, especially that of insulin".


Physiology or Medicine 1958

The prize was divided, one half being awarded jointly to:

"for their discovery that genes act by regulating definite chemical events";

and the other half to:

"for his discoveries concerning genetic recombination and the organization of the genetic material of bacteria".


Physiology or Medicine 1959

The prize was awarded jointly to:

"for their discovery of the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic and deoxyribonucleic acid."


Chemistry 1962

The prize was divided equally between:

"for their studies of the structures of globular proteins".


The 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

was awarded jointly to

"for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nuclear acids and its significance for information transfer in living material."


Chemistry 1964

The prize was awarded to:

"for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances".


Physiology or Medicine 1965

The prize was awarded jointly to:

"for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis."


Physiology or Medicine 1968

The prize was awarded jointly to:

"for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis".


Physiology or Medicine 1969

The prize was awarded jointly to:

"for their discoveries concerning the replication mechanism and the genetic structure of viruses".


Physiology or Medicine 1975

The prize was awarded jointly to:

"for their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumour viruses and the genetic material of the cell".


Chemistry 1972

The prize was divided, one half being awarded to:

"for his work on ribonuclease, especially concerning the connection between the amino acid sequence and the biologically active confirmation";

and the other half jointly to:

"for their contribution to the understanding of the connection between chemical structure and catalytic activity of the active centre of the ribonuclease molecule".


Physiology or Medicine 1978

The prize was awarded jointly to:

"for the discovery of restriction enzymes and their application to problems of molecular genetics".


Chemistry 1980

The prize was divided, one half being awarded to:

"for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant-DNA";

and the other half jointly to:

"for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids".


Chemistry 1982

"for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nuclei acid-protein complexes".


Physiology or Medicine 1983

"for her discovery of mobile genetic elements".


Physiology or Medicine 1989

The prize was awarded jointly to:

"for their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes.


Chemistry 1989

The prize was awarded jointly to:

"for their discovery of catalytic properties of RNA."


Chemistry 1993

The prize was awarded "for contributions to the developments of methods within DNA-based chemistry",

by one half to:

"for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method",

and by the other half to:

"for his fundamental contributions to the establishment of oligonucleotide-based, site-directed mutagenesis and its development for protein studies."


Physiology or Medicine 1993

The prize was awarded jointly to:

"for their discoveries of split genes."


Chemistry 2002

The prize was awarded "for the development of methods for identification and structure analyses of biological macromolecules"

by one half jointly to:

"for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules,"

and by the other half to:

"for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution."


Chemistry 2006

ROGER D. KORNBERG, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, b. 1947

"for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription."


Physiology or Medicine 2006

ANDREW Z. FIRE, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA

and

CRAIG C. MELLO, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA, USA

"for their discovery of RNA interference - gene silencing by double-stranded RNA."


Chemistry 2008

OSAMU SHIMOMURA, Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, MA, USA and Boston University Medical School, MA, USA

MARTIN CHALFIE, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

and

ROGER Y. TSIEN, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

"for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP."


Chemistry 2009

VENKATRAMAN RAMAKRISHNAN, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, United Kingdom

THOMAS A. STEITZ, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

and

ADA E. YONATH, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

"for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome."


Chemistry 2015

TOMAS LINDAHL, Francis Crick Institute and Clare Hall Laboratory, Hertfordshire, UK

PAUL MODRICH, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC, USA

and

AZIZ SANCAR, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

"for mechanistic studies of DNA repair."