List of nominees for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry (Swedish: Nobelpriset i kemi) is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists who have made outstanding contributions in chemistry.[1] It is one of the five Nobel Prizes which were established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895.[2]

Lise Meitner, the second woman to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Every year, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences sends out forms, which amount to a personal and exclusive invitation, to about three thousand selected individuals to invite them to submit nominations. The names of the nominees are never publicly announced, and neither are they told that they have been considered for the Prize. Nomination records are strictly sealed for fifty years. Currently, the nominations for the years 1901 to 1966 are publicly available. Despite the annual sending of invitations, the prize was not awarded in eight years (1916, 1917, 1919, 1924, 1933, 1940–42) and have been delayed for a year at least nine times.

From 1901 to 1966, there have been 526 scientists nominated for the prize, 72 of which were awarded either jointly or individually. 17 more scientists from these nominees were awarded after 1966 and Frederick Sanger was awarded second time on 1980. Of the 15 women nominees, only three were awarded. The first woman to be nominated was Marie Skłodowska Curie. She was nominated on 1911 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius and French mathematician Gaston Darboux and eventually won the prize on the same year. She is the only woman to win twice the Nobel Prize: Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911).[3] Besides 25 and 11 scientists from these nominees won the prizes in Physiology or Medicine and in Physics correspondingly (including years after 1966). Only one company has been nominated, the Geigy SA for the year 1947.

Despite the long list of nominated noteworthy chemists, physicists and engineers, there have been still some other great scientists who were overlooked for the prize in chemistry such as Per Teodor Cleve, Jannik Petersen Bjerrum, Ellen Swallow Richards, Alice Ball, Vladimir Palladin, Sergey Reformatsky, Prafulla Chandra Ray, Alexey Favorsky, Rosalind Franklin and Joseph Edward Mayer.