The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded 109 times to 178 Nobel Laureates between 1901 and 2017. Frederick Sanger is the only Nobel Laureate who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice, in 1958 and 1980. This means that a total of 177 individuals have received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Click on the links to get more information.
| Year | Laureate | Country | Rationale |
| 1901 | Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff | the Netherlands | "[for his] discovery of the laws of chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure in solutions" |
| 1902 | Hermann Emil Fischer | Germany | "[for] his work on sugar and purine syntheses" |
| 1903 | Svante August Arrhenius | Sweden | "[for] his electrolytic theory of dissociation" |
| 1904 | Sir William Ramsay | United Kingdom | "[for his] discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air, and his determination of their place in the periodic system" |
| 1905 | Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer | Germany | "[for] the advancement of organic chemistry and the chemical industry, through his work on organic dyes and hydroaromatic compounds" |
| 1906 | Henri Moissan | France | "[for his] investigation and isolation of the element fluorine, and for [the] electric furnace called after him" |
| 1907 | Eduard Buchner | Germany | "for his biochemical researches and his discovery of cell-free fermentation" |
| 1908 | Ernest Rutherford | United Kingdom New Zealand |
"for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances" |
| 1909 | Wilhelm Ostwald | Germany | "[for] his work on catalysis and for his investigations into the fundamental principles governing chemical equilibria and rates of reaction" |
| 1910 | Otto Wallach | Germany | "[for] his services to organic chemistry and the chemical industry by his pioneer work in the field of alicyclic compounds" |
| 1911 | Marie Curie, née Sklodowska | Poland/France | "[for] the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element" |
| 1912 | Victor Grignard | France | "for the discovery of the [...] Grignard reagent" |
| Paul Sabatier | France | "for his method of hydrogenating organic compounds in the presence of finely disintegrated metals"[20] | |
| 1913 | Alfred Werner | Switzerland | "[for] his work on the linkage of atoms in molecules [...] especially in inorganic chemistry" |
| 1914 | Theodore William Richards | United States | "[for] his accurate determinations of the atomic weight of a large number of chemical elements" |
| 1915 | Richard Martin Willstätter | Germany | "for his researches on plant pigments, especially chlorophyll" |
| 1916 | Not awarded | ||
| 1917 | |||
| 1918 | Fritz Haber | Germany | "for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements" |
| 1919 | Not awarded | ||
| 1920 | Walther Hermann Nernst | Germany | "[for] his work in thermochemistry" |
| 1921 | Frederick Soddy | United Kingdom | "for his contributions to our knowledge of the chemistry of radioactive substances, and his investigations into the origin and nature of isotopes" |
| 1922 | Francis William Aston | United Kingdom | "for his discovery, by means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes, in a large number of non-radioactive elements, and for his enunciation of the whole-number rule" |
| 1923 | Fritz Pregl | Austria | "for his invention of the method of micro-analysis of organic substances" |
| 1924 | Not awarded | ||
| 1925 | Richard Adolf Zsigmondy | Germany / Hungary | "for his demonstration of the heterogeneous nature of colloid solutions and for the methods he used" |
| 1926 | The (Theodor) Svedberg | Sweden | "for his work on disperse systems" |
| 1927 | Heinrich Otto Wieland | Germany | "for his investigations of the constitution of the bile acids and related substances" |
| 1928 | Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus | Germany | "[for] his research into the constitution of the sterols and their connection with the vitamins" |
| 1929 | Arthur Harden | United Kingdom | "for their investigations on the fermentation of sugar and fermentative enzymes" |
| Hans Karl August Simon von Euler-Chelpin | Germany | ||
| 1930 | Hans Fischer | Germany | "for his researches into the constitution of haemin and chlorophyll and especially for his synthesis of haemin" |
| 1931 | Carl Bosch | Germany | "[for] their contributions to the invention and development of chemical high pressure methods" |
| Friedrich Bergius | Germany | ||
| 1932 | Irving Langmuir | United States | "for his discoveries and investigations in surface chemistry" |
| 1933 | Not awarded | ||
| 1934 | Harold Clayton Urey | United States | "for his discovery of heavy hydrogen" |
| 1935 | Frédéric Joliot | France | "[for] their synthesis of new radioactive elements" |
| Irène Joliot-Curie | France | ||
| 1936 | Petrus (Peter) Josephus Wilhelmus Debye | the Netherlands | "[for his work on] molecular structure through his investigations on dipole moments and the diffraction of X-rays and electrons in gases" |
| 1937 | Walter Norman Haworth | United Kingdom | "for his investigations on carbohydrates and vitamin C" |
| Paul Karrer | Switzerland | "for his investigations on carotenoids, flavins and vitamins A and B2" | |
| 1938 | Richard Kuhn | Germany | "for his work on carotenoids and vitamins" |
| 1939 | Adolf Friedrich Johann Butenandt | Germany | "for his work on sex hormones" |
| Leopold Ruzicka | Croatia | "for his work on polymethylenes and higher terpenes" | |
| 1940 | Not awarded | ||
| 1941 | |||
| 1942 | |||
| 1943 | George de Hevesy | Hungary | "for his work on the use of isotopes as tracers in the study of chemical processes" |
| 1944 | Otto Hahn | Germany | "for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei" |
| 1945 | Artturi Ilmari Virtanen | Finland | "for his research and inventions in agricultural and nutrition chemistry, especially for his fodder preservation method" |
| 1946 | James Batcheller Sumner | United States | "for his discovery that enzymes can be crystallized" |
| John Howard Northrop | United States | "for their preparation of enzymes and virus proteins in a pure form" | |
| Wendell Meredith Stanley | United States | ||
| 1947 | Sir Robert Robinson | United Kingdom | "for his investigations on plant products of biological importance, especially the alkaloids" |
| 1948 | Arne Wilhelm Kaurin Tiselius | Sweden | "for his research on electrophoresis and adsorption analysis, especially for his discoveries concerning the complex nature of the serum proteins" |
| 1949 | William Francis Giauque | United States | "for his contributions in the field of chemical thermodynamics, particularly concerning the behaviour of substances at extremely low temperatures" |
| 1950 | Otto Paul Hermann Diels | Federal Republic of Germany | "for their discovery and development of the diene synthesis" |
| Kurt Alder | Federal Republic of Germany | ||
| 1951 | Edwin Mattison McMillan | United States | "for their discoveries in the chemistry of transuranium elements" |
| Glenn Theodore Seaborg | United States | ||
| 1952 | Archer John Porter Martin | United Kingdom | "for their invention of partition chromatography" |
| Richard Laurence Millington Synge | United Kingdom | ||
| 1953 | Hermann Staudinger | Federal Republic of Germany | "for his discoveries in the field of macromolecular chemistry" |
| 1954 | Linus Carl Pauling | United States | "for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances" |
| 1955 | Vincent du Vigneaud | United States | "for his work on biochemically important sulphur compounds, especially for the first synthesis of a polypeptide hormone" |
| 1956 | Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood | United Kingdom | "for their researches into the mechanism of chemical reactions" |
| Nikolay Nikolaevich Semenov | USSR | ||
| 1957 | Lord (Alexander R.) Todd | United Kingdom | "for his work on nucleotides and nucleotide co-enzymes" |
| 1958 | Frederick Sanger | United Kingdom | "for his work on the structure of proteins, especially that of insulin" |
| 1959 | Jaroslav Heyrovský | Czechoslovakia | "for his discovery and development of the polarographic methods of analysis" |
| 1960 | Willard Frank Libby | United States | "for his method to use carbon-14 for age determination in archaeology, geology, geophysics, and other branches of science" |
| 1961 | Melvin Calvin | United States | "for his research on the carbon dioxide assimilation in plants" |
| 1962 | Max Ferdinand Perutz | United Kingdom | "for their studies of the structures of globular proteins" |
| John Cowdery Kendrew | United Kingdom | ||
| 1963 | Karl Ziegler | Federal Republic of Germany | "for their discoveries in the field of the chemistry and technology of high polymers" |
| Giulio Natta | Italy | ||
| 1964 | Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin | United Kingdom | "for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances" |
| 1965 | Robert Burns Woodward | United States | "for his outstanding achievements in the art of organic synthesis" |
| 1966 | Robert S. Mulliken | United States | "for his fundamental work concerning chemical bonds and the electronic structure of molecules by the molecular orbital method" |
| 1967 | Manfred Eigen | Federal Republic of Germany | "for their studies of extremely fast chemical reactions, effected by disturbing the equilibrium by means of very short pulses of energy" |
| Ronald George Wreyford Norrish | United Kingdom | ||
| George Porter | United Kingdom | ||
| 1968 | Lars Onsager | United States | "for the discovery of the reciprocal relations bearing his name, which are fundamental for the thermodynamics of irreversible processes" |
| 1969 | Derek H. R. Barton | United Kingdom | "for their contributions to the development of the concept of conformation and its application in chemistry" |
| Odd Hassel | Norway | ||
| 1970 | Luis F. Leloir | Argentina | "for his discovery of sugar nucleotides and their role in the biosynthesis of carbohydrates" |
| 1971 | Gerhard Herzberg | Canada | "for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals" |
| 1972 | Christian B. Anfinsen | United States | "for his work on ribonuclease, especially concerning the connection between the amino acid sequence and the biologically active conformation" |
| Stanford Moore | United States | "for their contribution to the understanding of the connection between chemical structure and catalytic activity of the active centre of the ribonuclease molecule" | |
| William H. Stein | United States | ||
| 1973 | Ernst Otto Fischer | Federal Republic of Germany | "for their pioneering work, performed independently, on the chemistry of the organometallic, so called sandwich compounds" |
| Geoffrey Wilkinson | United Kingdom | ||
| 1974 | Paul J. Flory | United States | "for his fundamental work, both theoretical and experimental, in the physical chemistry of macromolecules" |
| 1975 | John Warcup Cornforth | Australia United Kingdom |
"for his work on the stereochemistry of enzyme-catalyzed reactions" |
| Vladimir Prelog | Yugoslavia/Switzerland | "for his research into the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions"[75] | |
| 1976 | William N. Lipscomb | United States | "for his studies on the structure of boranes illuminating problems of chemical bonding" |
| 1977 | Ilya Prigogine | Belgium | "for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures" |
| 1978 | Peter D. Mitchell | United Kingdom | "for his contribution to the understanding of biological energy transfer through the formulation of the chemiosmotic theory" |
| 1979 | Herbert C. Brown | United States | "for their development of the use of boron- and phosphorus-containing compounds, respectively, into important reagents in organic synthesis" |
| Georg Wittig | Federal Republic of Germany | ||
| 1980 | Paul Berg | United States | "for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant-DNA" |
| Walter Gilbert | United States | "for their contributions concerning the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids" | |
| Frederick Sanger | United Kingdom | ||
| 1981 | Kenichi Fukui | Japan | "for their theories, developed independently, concerning the course of chemical reactions" |
| Roald Hoffmann | United States | ||
| 1982 | Aaron Klug | United Kingdom | "for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes" |
| 1983 | Henry Taube | United States | "for his work on the mechanisms of electron transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes" |
| 1984 | Robert Bruce Merrifield | United States | "for his development of methodology for chemical synthesis on a solid matrix" |
| 1985 | Herbert A. Hauptman | United States | "for their outstanding achievements in developing direct methods for the determination of crystal structures" |
| Jerome Karle | United States | ||
| 1986 | Dudley R. Herschbach | United States | "for their contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes" |
| Yuan T. Lee | United States | ||
| John C. Polanyi | Canada / Hungary | ||
| 1987 | Donald J. Cram | United States | "for their development and use of molecules with structure-specific interactions of high selectivity" |
| Jean-Marie Lehn | France | ||
| Charles J. Pedersen | United States | ||
| 1988 | Johann Deisenhofer | Federal Republic of Germany | "for their determination of the three-dimensional structure of a photosynthetic reaction centre" |
| Robert Huber | Federal Republic of Germany | ||
| Hartmut Michel | Federal Republic of Germany | ||
| 1989 | Sidney Altman | Canada United States |
"for their discovery of catalytic properties of RNA" |
| Thomas R. Cech | United States | ||
| 1990 | Elias James Corey | United States | "for his development of the theory and methodology of organic synthesis" |
| 1991 | Richard R. Ernst | Switzerland | "for his contributions to the development of the methodology of high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy" |
| 1992 | Rudolph A. Marcus | United States | "for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems" |
| 1993 | Kary B. Mullis | United States | "for contributions to the developments of methods within DNA-based chemistry [...] for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method" |
| Michael Smith | Canada | "for contributions to the developments of methods within DNA-based chemistry [...] for his fundamental contributions to the establishment of oligonucleotide-based, site-directed mutagenesis and its development for protein studies" | |
| 1994 | George A. Olah | United States / Hungary | "for his contribution to carbocation chemistry" |
| 1995 | Paul J. Crutzen | the Netherlands | "for their work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone" |
| Mario J. Molina | Mexico | ||
| F. Sherwood Rowland | United States | ||
| 1996 | Robert F. Curl Jr. | United States | "for their discovery of fullerenes" |
| Sir Harold W. Kroto | United Kingdom | ||
| Richard E. Smalley | United States | ||
| 1997 | Paul D. Boyer | United States | "for their elucidation of the enzymatic mechanism underlying the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)" |
| John E. Walker | United Kingdom | ||
| Jens C. Skou | Denmark | "for the first discovery of an ion-transporting enzyme, Na+, K+ -ATPase"[97] | |
| 1998 | Walter Kohn | United States | "for his development of the density-functional theory"[98] |
| John A. Pople | United Kingdom | "for his development of computational methods in quantum chemistry"[98] | |
| 1999 | Ahmed H. Zewail | Egypt United States |
"for his studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy"[99] |
| 2000 | Alan J. Heeger | United States | "for their discovery and development of conductive polymers"[100] |
| Alan G MacDiarmid | United States New Zealand |
||
| Hideki Shirakawa | Japan | ||
| 2001 | William S. Knowles | United States | "for their work on chirally catalysed hydrogenation reactions"[101] |
| Ryōji Noyori | Japan | ||
| K. Barry Sharpless | United States | "for his work on chirally catalysed oxidation reactions"[101] | |
| 2002 | John B. Fenn | United States | "for the development of methods for identification and structure analyses of biological macromolecules [...] for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules"[102] |
| Koichi Tanaka | Japan | ||
| Kurt Wüthrich | Switzerland | "for the development of methods for identification and structure analyses of biological macromolecules [...] for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution"[102] | |
| 2003 | Peter Agre | United States | "for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes [...] for the discovery of water channels"[103] |
| Roderick MacKinnon | United States | "for discoveries concerning channels in cell membranes [...] for structural and mechanistic studies of ion channels"[103] | |
| 2004 | Aaron Ciechanover | Israel | "for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation"[104] |
| Avram Hershko | Israel | ||
| Irwin Rose | United States | ||
| 2005 | Yves Chauvin | France | "for the development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis"[105] |
| Robert H. Grubbs | United States | ||
| Richard R. Schrock | United States | ||
| 2006 | Roger D. Kornberg | United States | "for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription"[106] |
| 2007 | Gerhard Ertl | Germany | "for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces"[107] |
| 2008 | Osamu Shimomura | Japan[108] | "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP"[109] |
| Martin Chalfie | United States | ||
| Roger Y. Tsien | United States | ||
| 2009 | Venkatraman Ramakrishnan | United States | "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome"[110] |
| Thomas A. Steitz | United States | ||
| Ada E. Yonath | Israel | ||
| 2010 | Richard F. Heck | United States | "for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis"[111] |
| Ei-ichi Negishi | Japan | ||
| Akira Suzuki | Japan |
