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“This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry is about the world’s smallest machines.”

G?ran Hansson, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, earlier this morning.

“The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided¹ to award the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly² to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir James Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa for the design and synthesis of molecular³ machines.”

Sauvage was born in Paris and is now an emeritus⁴ professor at the University of Strasbourg. Stoddart comes from Edinborough and is now at Northwestern University in Illinois. Feringa is from the Netherlands and is at the University of Groningen.

Following the announcement, Feringa called in and explained some of the potential applications for the microscopic⁵ machines.

“First of all let me say I feel a little bit like the Wright Brothers, who were flying a hundred years ago for the first time. And then people were saying, "You know, why do we need a flying machine?" And now we have a Boeing 747 and an Airbus. So that is a bit how I feel…but once you are able to control movement, you have a motor, you can think of all kinds of functions.

“So indeed, we think of transporters, like in your body there are many motors and machines that make it possible that your cells divide, that your muscles work, that there is transport in the cells, etc. But you can think also much broader. Think about nanomachines, microrobots, think about tiny robots that the doctor in the future will inject in your bloodstreams and that go to search for a cancer cell or are going to deliver a drug for instance. But also smart materials, for instance, materials that can adapt, change, depending on an external signal, just like our body functions. That is the kind of functions you can think of.”

—Steve Mirsky