SCOTLAND’S remarkable record of winning Nobel Prizes continued yesterday when Edinburgh-born Richard Henderson was jointly awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
He becomes the 14th Scot to win a Nobel Prize, and puts his native country out on its own as the third in the list of Nobel laureates per head of population, with only host nation Sweden and Switzerland ahead of Scotland for countries with a population of more than a million.
Educated at Boroughmuir Secondary and Edinburgh University – he is the 21st Nobel laureate linked to the University – Dr Henderson, 72, won the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the development of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM).
The process makes it possible for life’s molecular building blocks to be captured mid-movement and allows scientists to visualise internal processes that had not been seen before.
In awarding the prize jointly to Henderson and Jacques Dubochet of Switzerland and Joachim Frank of Germany, the Nobel committee said the trio had moved biochemistry into a new era.
Committee chair Sara Snogerup Linse explained: “Soon, there are no more secrets, now, we can see the intricate details of the biomolecules in every corner of our cells and every drop of our body fluids.
“We can understand how they are built and how they act and how they work together in large communities. We are facing a revolution in biochemistry.”
Henderson, whose share of the prize is worth £278,000, almost didn’t take the call telling him he had won. He was at a scientific meeting in Leicester University when the Nobel Committee tried to contact him.
“I was there happily listening to talks,” he said, “and then the phone rang at about 10.10 – and I rarely get phone calls from Sweden but I’m surrounded by the audience so I rejected the phone call. And then it rang again and I thought I had better [take it] so I went outside and called back.”
“Eventually after about five minutes I managed to get through ... they told me that the chemistry prize was going to be awarded with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank who of course I know very well, so I think that’s quite delightful really.”
He added: “I am delighted for everybody in the field that the Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to acknowledge the success of cryo-EM. I am particularly pleased that Jacques Dubochet has been recognised as the key person who kick-started the field with his method of rapid-freezing in the early 1980s, a crucial advance.”
Henderson graduated with a degree in physics from Edinburgh in 1966 and received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Edinburgh in 2008. He has spent almost all his career at the Medical Research Council’s Molecular Biology Lab in Cambridge where he became the first scientist to achieve atomic resolution of biomolecules with cryo-EM. He will receive his prize in Stockholm in December.
Another scientist with a strong Scottish connection was awarded the joint prize for Medicine on Tuesday. Professor Michael Rosbash, who was a researcher at Edinburgh in the early 1970s, is one of three scientists recognised for their work in so-called circadian rhythms.
Professor Rosbash, currently of Brandeis University in Waltham, US, shares the 2017 prize with Professor Jeffrey Hall, also of Brandeis, and Professor Michael Young of Rockefeller University.
The award was made for their discoveries of the molecular mechanisms behind circadian rhythms – the 24-hour cycle that controls sleeping, waking, and other basic processes in people and other living things.
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