EU FUNDING SUPPORT NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING DISCOVERIES

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2017 was awarded on 4 October jointly to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson for the development of cryo-electron microscopy, which simplifies and improves the imaging of biomolecules.

Two of the laureates, Jacques Dubochet and Richard Henderson, benefitted from EU funding in their careers. Professor Dubochet participated in the 3D-EM project, which worked with an EU contribution of €10 million on developing new electron microscopy approaches for studying protein complexes and cellular supramolecular architecture. Professor Henderson took part in the INSTRUCT project, which received EU funding of €4.5 million for building infrastructure for structural biology studies and he also participated in the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Intra-European Fellowship MEMBRANE PROTEASES.

This follows the announcement, on 3 October, of the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 to Rainer Weiss and Kip S. Thorne together with Barry C. Barish. They were jointly recognised for bringing over fifty years of research together in a scientific publication on the observation of the universe’s gravitational waves for the very first time.

An important contribution to their research was made by Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellows Jose M. González, Matthieu Gosselin, Imran Khan, Justus Schmidt, Akshat Singhal, Shubhanshu Tiwari, Daniel Töyrä, Serena Vinciguerra and Gang Wang of the GraWIToN project, which received €3.7 million in EU funding.

News Alert: 2017 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry

News Alert: 2017 Nobel Prizes in Physics