Chemistry
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry to Swiss chemist Richard R. Ernst, of the Eidgen”ssische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland. Ernst's contributions to the development of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy have made the technique nearly indispensable in many of today's scientific laboratories studying a wide range of phenomena, such as the three-dimensional structure of proteins, the chemical interactions of molecules in solution, and the effects of drugs on metabolic processes.
Although Ernst has been active in the field of NMR spectroscopy for some 30 years, he was recognized by the Nobel committee primarily for two fundamental advances, Fourier-transform NMR (FT-NMR) and two-dimensional NMR (2D-NMR).
NMR was developed in the 1940s by two independent groups, Felix Bloch's at Stanford University and Edward Purcell's at Harvard University; both men shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1952. Although NMR's analytical potential was recognized ...
