Why DNA Sequencing Should Win Tomorrow's Chemistry Nobel

On Wednesday morning, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will announce this year's chemistry Nobel, closing out a Nobel week that opened with a medicine prize for controlling brain cells with light. The announcement comes shortly before noon Stockholm time and will be streamed live for the small audience that treats chemistry's biggest morning like a holiday. That audience should be bigger.

The chemistry Nobel is the prize that built the modern world, and it is also the one the public pays the least attention to. Peace makes headlines. Literature starts arguments. Chemistry quietly decides which medicines exist, which batteries are possible, and what the food supply looks like. Young people live inside chemistry's answers every day: the ancestry tests, the COVID tests, the sunscreen, the phone battery that dies a little slower each year.

This year, the Academy has a chance to make the chemistry Nobel honor the single invention that has touched the most lives in living memory: next-generation DNA sequencing. According to C&EN's roundup of predictions, two of the most credible names in the running are Sir Shankar Balasubramanian and Sir David Klenerman, the pioneers behind the sequencing technology that turned reading a genome from a billion-dollar moonshot into a routine lab procedure. Their work sits underneath the ancestry tests millions of people have spat into, the newborn screening panels that catch rare diseases in the first days of life, and the cancer diagnostics that find tumors in a blood draw. It also powered the variant tracking that shaped the COVID years, which is to say it shaped the teenage years of an entire generation.

The chemistry Nobel prediction crowd keeps landing on sequencing for a reason. C&EN reports that multiple forecasters picked the sequencing pioneers, and the site's readers' poll and webinar attendees leaned the same way. David Pendlebury, Clarivate's head of research analysis, told C&EN in an email that "invention or technical achievement seems likely" to define this year's pick. Sequencing fits that description better than almost anything else in contention.

The rest of the shortlist is genuinely strong

None of this dismisses the other contenders. Clarivate named three chemistry entries among its citation laureates, as summarized in a roundup of the announcement schedule and picks: David Allara, Ralph Nuzzo and Jacob Sagiv for self-assembled monolayers; Harry Gray and Jay Winkler for work on long-range electron transfer in proteins; and David Liu of Harvard and the Broad Institute for base editing and prime editing, the precision gene-editing tools described in a landmark Nature paper. The perovskite solar cell inventors Tsutomu Miyasaka, Nam-Gyu Park and Henry Snaith have their backers too, and they carry the climate argument: cheap solar is the technology the century needs most. Biochemist Chi-Huey Wong, known for programmable synthesis of carbohydrates and glycoproteins, topped C&EN's readers' poll by a large margin.

Any of these would be a defensible pick. But prizes are signals, and the chemistry Nobel is at its best when it rewards the invention the world already runs on. Perovskites may power the future. Base editing may cure the diseases of the future. Sequencing already reads the present.

Chemistry keeps winning the decade quietly

The recent roll call makes the point. Last year's prize went to metal-organic frameworks. Before that came protein structure prediction and design, an AI-driven breakthrough examined in this site's look at the fight over pausing AI development, and before that, quantum dots, as Chemistry World noted in its Nobel-week coverage. Each one moved from the lab into products and tools within years, not decades. The chemistry Nobel has become the prize for inventions that ship.

That is the standard the Academy should hold on Wednesday. Monday's medicine prize honored optogenetics, the work of Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel on controlling brain cells with light, and it carries twelve million Swedish kronor, roughly one point two million dollars. Physics had its turn on Tuesday, previewed earlier this week on this site. Chemistry's morning is the one that will matter most to the most people, because chemistry is the science of stuff, and stuff is what everyone touches.

So here is the editorial position, stated plainly: the chemistry Nobel should go to the sequencers. Balasubramanian and Klenerman's technology sits in more hospitals and labs than any other candidate's work, and it shows up in diagnostics that catch cancer early, a subject this site covered in its report on the surprising link researchers found between appendectomy and cancer risk. The chemistry Nobel has honored elegant mechanisms before. This year it can point at the machine humming in the corner of the lab and say that it changed everything. The Academy announces its choice on Wednesday, and the rest of the week can argue about it.