The award-giving body said in a tweet on Wednesday: “The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the #NobelPrize in Chemistry 2018 with one half to Frances H. Arnold and the other half jointly to George P. Smith and Sir Gregory P. Winter (sic)”
This year’s chemistry laureates have taken control of evolution and used the same principles - genetic change and selection - to develop proteins that solve humankind's chemical problems," it added.
Frances Arnold
Frances Arnold is just the fifth ever woman in the field of chemistry to be felicitated with the most prestigious honour.
She won one half of the nine million Swedish kronor (about $1.01 million or 870,000 euros) award, while Smith and Winter shared the other half.
The 62-year-old laureate has survived breast cancer and is a single mother to three sons. She is a professor of chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology.
They have applied the principles of Darwin in test tubes. They have used the molecular understanding we have of the evolutionary process and recreated the process in their labs," the head of the Academy's Nobel Chemistry committee, Claes Gustafsson, was quoted as saying, by AFP. "They have been able to make evolution many 1000s of times faster and redirect it to create new proteins."
The peace prize will be announced on Friday, and the economics prize will wrap up the Nobel season on Monday, October 8.