Stockholm – The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, on Wednesday, named Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa, as winners of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The academy said in statement in Stockholm that they won the prizes for the design and synthesis of molecular machines.
It stated that “the 2016 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, had miniaturised machines and taken chemistry to a new dimension”.
According to the statement, the machines are a thousand times thinner than a hair strand.
The academy said that the trio, based in France, the U.S. and the Netherlands, developed molecules with controllable movements, which could perform a task when energy was added.
“Molecular machines will most likely be used in the development of new materials, sensors and energy storage systems”.
The chemistry prize was the third of this year’s Nobel Prize awards to be announced.
Endowed by Swedish chemist and industrialist Alfred Nobel, each award is worth 930,000 dollars.
