Frances H Arnold, George P Smith and Gregory P Winter win 2018 Nobel prize in chemistry
The 2018 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday Oct 03,2018 to Frances H. Arnold, George P. Smith and Gregory P. Winter for their work that harnessed evolutionary principles to create new proteins.
British scientist Sir Gregory P Winter and Americans Frances H Arnold and George P Smith will share the 9m Swedish kronor (£770,000) prize, awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.In announcing the award, the Royal Swedish Academy said that this year's prize "awards a revolution based on evolution," and goes to scientists who "applied the principles of Darwin in the test tube." .
The
methods developed by the laureates have been put to work to create new
enzymes and antibodies used in promoting a greener chemicals industry,
mitigating disease and saving lives.
Arnold, of the California Institute of
Technology, was recognized for performing the first-ever "directed
evolution" of enzymes, which are proteins that catalyze chemical
reactions. Enzymes produced through directed evolution are used to
manufacture everything from sustainable biofuels to pharmaceuticals.Frances H Arnold is only the fifth woman to be awarded the prize for chemistry - the last female scientist to scoop the award was Ada E Yonath in 2009, who shared the prize for her work on understanding the structure of ribosomes: the protein-manufacturing structures inside cells.
George P Smith, a professor at the University of Missouri, won for a method known as "phage display," which uses bacteriophage -- a virus that infects bacteria -- to evolve new proteins.
Gregory P Winter, of the University of Cambridge in the UK, harnessed that method and used it to produce new antibodies, with the aim of making new drugs. Phage display has since been used to produce antibodies that can neutralize toxins, counteract autoimmune diseases and cure metastatic cancer
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