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Dubochet, Frank, Henderson Win 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Dubochet, Frank, Henderson Win 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

(Bloomberg) -- Jacques Dubochet from Switzerland, Joachim Frank from Germany and Richard Henderson from the U.K. were awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Dubochet, Frank, Henderson Win 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The winners got the prize for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement on Wednesday.

The development “simplifies and improves the imaging of biomolecules," it said. "In the past few years, scientific literature has been filled with images of everything from proteins that cause antibiotic resistance, to the surface of the Zika virus."

Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. The prize in economic sciences was added by Sweden’s central bank in 1968. The total amount for each of the 2017 prizes is 9 million kronor ($1.1 million), up from 8 million kronor last year.

To contact the reporters on this story: Veronica Ek in Stockholm at vek@bloomberg.net, Hanna Hoikkala in Stockholm at hhoikkala@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jonas Bergman at jbergman@bloomberg.net, Tasneem Hanfi Brögger at tbrogger@bloomberg.net, Niklas Magnusson, Kim Robert McLaughlin