Three scientists won a Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for advances in a field that has big hopes for very tiny machines — the smallest ever built.
Frenchman Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Scottish-born Fraser Stoddart and Dutch scientist Bernard “Ben” Feringa were honored for making devices the size of molecules, so tiny that a lineup of 1,000 would stretch about the width of a human hair.
Someday, experts say, such devices might lead to benefits like better computer chips and batteries, and tiny shuttles that could be injected into patients to deliver drugs directly to infections and tumors. But that’s a long ways away.
“There are not big applications looming up tomorrow,” Stoddart, 74, a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who became a U.S. citizen in 2011, told the Associated Press.
“I applaud the fact that for once in chemistry Stockholm has recognized a piece of chemistry that is extremely fundamental in its making and being,” he said later.
Feringa, 65, is a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Sauvage, 71, is professor emeritus at the University of Strasbourg and director of research emeritus at France’s National Center for Scientific Research.
The three share the 8 million kronor ($930,000) prize, having “taken chemistry to a new dimension,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. The academy said the men’s work has inspired other researchers to build increasingly advanced molecular machinery, including a robot that can grasp and connect amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
