The speculation about who will win this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry has begun in chemistry classes and magazine newsrooms. Chemical & Engineering News collaborated with ACS Webinars to provide a Nobel predictions webinar prior to next week’s announcement (ACS publishes C&EN).

On September 29, a C&EN’s hour-long webinar in the presence of Stephen Davey, chief editor of Nature Reviews Chemistry, Helen Tran of the University of Toronto, and Guillermo Restrepo of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences discussed Restrepo’s analysis of how the chemistry prize has rewarded more biological chemistry. The panel also predicted how the prize would evolve in the future.

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Many panellists predicted that the COVID-19 pandemic would have an impact on the selection of the chemistry laureate in 2021, but that did not happen. Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó, who enable mRNA vaccines, received a resounding majority of the audience’s votes, making them the expected winners for the second consecutive year.

ChemistryViews, a publication of Chemistry Europe, has been polling its readers to see who they think will win. According to the poll results, an American biochemist is most likely to win. Readers suggested Omar M. Yaghi, biochemist Chi-Huey Wong, and protein structure predictor John Jumper as per Chemical & Engineering News. 

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Stuart Cantrill, a long-time predictor, conducted his annual Twitter poll of his followers. As in the previous year, the majority of respondents chose bioorthogonal/click chemistry. Also on Twitter, Paul Bracher’s ChemBark account updated his odds list of winners. The favourites were free-radical polymerization researchers such as Krzysztof Matyjaszewski and Ezio Rizzardo.

Zhenan Bao, a pioneer in wearable electronics, Daniel Nocera, an expert in electron transport, and Bonnie Bassler and Peter Greenberg for their research into quorum sensing, a type of chemical communication between bacteria, are three potential winners, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science analysis based on citation data.

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But until the offcial declaration, nobody will be certain. On October 5, the Nobel Prize Committee will reveal the recipients of the Chemistry Prize.