The 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded for the development of the world’s smallest machines. Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L Feringa will share the prize for the design and synthesis of machines on a molecular scale.
They were named at a press conference in Sweden.
The machines conceived by today’s laureates are a thousand times thinner than a strand of hair.
They could slip inside to human body to deliver drugs from within – for instance, applying pharmaceuticals directly to cancer cells.