A Swiss chemist who works part time in La Jolla, a Japanese and an American will share the 2002 Nobel Prize in chemistry for "revolutionary breakthroughs" that are helping scientists determine the complex structures of proteins and other large molecules that play key roles in living organisms.
The techniques they pioneered have led to quicker detection of cancers, development of drugs for a variety of diseases and new ways to monitor contamination of foods.
"They are enablers, toolmakers who gave chemists better ways to answer amazing questions about biological molecules," said chemist Catherine C. Fenselau of the University of Maryland.
John B. Fenn, 85, of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and Koichi Tanaka, 43, of Shimadzu Corp. in Kyoto, Japan, will share half of the estimated $1-million prize for developing techniques to study large molecules by mass spectrometry.
Kurt Wuthrich, 64, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, will get the other half for applying the techniques of nuclear magnetic resonance imaging to macromolecules.
Tanaka, an engineer, is one of the very few science winners in the modern era who does not have a doctorate. He is the second Japanese winner this year; Masatoshi Koshiba of the University of Tokyo received the Nobel for physics Tuesday.
At a news conference in Tokyo, Tanaka said he received a phone call telling him to stand by for an important call, then a second call with "someone talking to me in English. I thought I heard a word, 'Nobel,' and 'Congratulations,' but I still had no idea what they were talking about."
"I still can't believe even now that I would win this kind of prize," he said. "If I had known, I would have ... dressed in a suit and tie, so I apologize for my attire."
Fenn said that he was "sort of overwhelmed" by the prize. "It was a bolt out of the blue. You can never expect these things, so I am still in a state of shock."
At a news conference, Fenn said, "There's an awful lot of luck in this. In fact, there's a lot of luck in science. To succeed as a theorist, you have to be good. To succeed as an experimentalist, you only have to be lucky. As an experimentalist, you go through life kicking over a lot of stones and, if you're lucky, you'll find something."
In Zurich, Wuthrich said he was "delighted and surprised" with the award.
