The Nobel Prize in Chemistry () is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists who have made outstanding contributions in chemistry. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes which were established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895.
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 1974 are publicly available. Despite the annual sending of invitations, the prize was not awarded in eight years (1916, 1917, 1919, 1924, 1933, 1940âÂÂ42) and was delayed for a year nine times (1914, 1918, 1920, 1921, 1925, 1927, 1938, 1943, 1944).
From 1901 to 1974, there were 760 scientists nominated for the prize, 87 of whom were awarded the prize either jointly or individually. 14 more scientists from these nominees were awarded the prize after 1974, and Frederick Sanger received a second award in 1980. Of only 15 women nominees, three were awarded a prize. The first woman to be nominated was Marie Skà Âodowska Curie. She was nominated in 1911 by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius and French mathematician Gaston Darboux, and won the prize on the same year. She is the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice: Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911). Also, 32 and 15 scientists out of these nominees won the prizes in Physiology or Medicine and in Physics (including one woman more) respectively (including years after 1974). Only one company has been nominated: Geigy SA, for the year 1947.
Despite the long list of nominated noteworthy chemists, physicists and engineers, there have also been other 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.
In addition, nominations of 21 scientists and four corporations more were declared invalid by the Nobel Committee.
Nominees are published 50 years later so 1975 nominees should be published in 2026.