Claim: Chemistry Nobel for using evolution to create new proteins.
Verdict: SUPPORTS

Retrieved passages:
title: Frances Arnold
text: 2016. Arnold is credited with pioneering the use of directed evolution to create enzymes (biochemical molecules—often proteins—that catalyze, or speed up, chemical reactions) with improved and/or novel functions. The directed evolution strategy involves iterative rounds of randomly mutating proteins' genes and screening for proteins with improved functions and it has been used to create useful biological systems, including enzymes, metabolic pathways, genetic regulatory circuits, and organisms. In nature, evolution by natural selection can lead to proteins (including enzymes) well-suited to carry out biological tasks, but natural selection can only act on existing sequence variations (mutations) and typically occurs over long

title: History of science and technology in Japan
text: hydrocarbons." He later received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his investigations into the mechanisms of chemical reactions, with his prize-winning work focused on the role of frontier orbitals in chemical reactions, specifically that molecules share loosely bonded electrons which occupy the frontier orbitals, that is the Highest Occupied Molecular Orbital (HOMO) and the Lowest Unoccupied Molecular Orbital (LUMO). Ryōji Noyori was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his "work on chirally catalyzed hydrogenation reactions" in 1968. In the 1960s and 1970s, green fluorescent proteins (GFP), along with the separate luminescent protein aequorin (an enzyme that catalyzes

title: Maxygen
text: of Directed Evolution to protein engineering, and wanting to continue the legacy, a private investor acquired the Maxygen trademark and was granted full rights to the name on January 9th 2018. The importance of Directed Evolution was further exemplified when the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 2018 for the development of this technique for protein engineering. Maxygen is now a privately owned company operating in Sunnyvale, CA providing rapid protein engineering applying Molecular Breeding to accomplish Directed Evolution. Additionally, Maxygen leverages advanced synthetic biology techniques to further accelerate the optimization of proteins and expressing them. One such capability

title: Francis Crick
text: used by existing organisms. At that time, everyone thought of proteins as the only kind of enzymes, and ribozymes had not yet been found. Many molecular biologists were puzzled by the problem of the origin of a protein replicating system that is as complex as that which exists in organisms currently inhabiting Earth. In the early 1970s, Crick and Orgel further speculated about the possibility that the production of living systems from molecules may have been a very rare event in the universe, but once it had developed it could be spread by intelligent life forms using space travel technology,

title: Frederic M. Richards
text: metal-binding sites into proteins, and used them to build a new metal site into thioredoxin. Richards is named as a depositor on 27 crystal structure entries in the Protein Data Bank, including the now-obsoleted ribonuclease S (), hen egg lysozyme (), SH3 domains (), the ion-channel-forming alamethicin () (), and mutants of ribonuclease S (e.g., ;), of Staphylococcal nuclease (e.g., ;), and of lambda repressor in complex with DNA (). The Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry ("MB&B") that Richards founded and chaired at Yale, which amalgamated the medical school Biochemistry and the university Molecular Biophysics departments, was considered to

title: Andreas Plückthun
text: new directed evolution technologies. He won a Young Investigator's Award of the German Chemical Industry Trust (Fonds der chemischen Industrie). In 2000, he received the Karl-Heinz-Beckurts Award (Munich, Germany). In 2002 he was given the J. P. Morgan Chase Health Award (San Jose, CA, USA), the Wilhelm-Exner Medal (Vienna, Austria) and The Jury's Grand Prix (European Grand Prix for Innovation, Monaco). Together with the other founders of Molecular Partners AG, he received the Swiss Technology Award and the De Vigier Award in 2005. In 2011 he was awarded a Senior Investigator Grant of the European Research Council. He is the

title: DNA
text: the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Nobel Prizes are awarded only to living recipients. A debate continues about who should receive credit for the discovery. In an influential presentation in 1957, Crick laid out the central dogma of molecular biology, which foretold the relationship between DNA, RNA, and proteins, and articulated the "adaptor hypothesis". Final confirmation of the replication mechanism that was implied by the double-helical structure followed in 1958 through the Meselson–Stahl experiment. Further work by Crick and coworkers showed that the genetic code was based on non-overlapping triplets of bases, called codons, allowing Har Gobind Khorana, Robert

title: History of molecular evolution
text: 1960s Curtis Williams and Morris Goodman used immunological comparisons to study primate phylogeny. Others, such as Linus Pauling and his students, applied newly developed combinations of electrophoresis and paper chromatography to proteins subject to partial digestion by digestive enzymes to create unique two-dimensional patterns, allowing fine-grained comparisons of homologous proteins. Beginning in the 1950s, a few naturalists also experimented with molecular approaches—notably Ernst Mayr and Charles Sibley. While Mayr quickly soured on paper chromatography, Sibley successfully applied electrophoresis to egg-white proteins to sort out problems in bird taxonomy, soon supplemented that with DNA hybridization techniques—the beginning of a long career

title: Frances Arnold
text: win the Millennium Technology Prize, which she won for pioneering directed evolution. In 2017, Arnold was awarded the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Convergence Research by the National Academy of Sciences, which recognizes extraordinary contributions to convergence research. In 2018 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work in directed evolution, making her the fifth woman to receive the award in its 117 years of existence, and the first American woman. She received a one-half share of the award, with the other half jointly awarded to George Smith and Gregory Winter "for the phage display of

title: Dudley R. Herschbach
text: and Pierre LeBreton began to construct a "supermachine" for studying collisions such as Cl + Br and hydrogen and halogen reactions. His most acclaimed work, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986 with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi, was his collaboration with Yuan T. Lee on crossed molecular beam experiments. Crossing collimated beams of gas-phase reactants allows partitioning of energy among translational, rotational, and vibrational modes of the product molecules—a vital aspect of understanding reaction dynamics. For their contributions to reaction dynamics, Herschbach and Lee are considered to have helped create a new field

title: Nobel Prize controversies
text: Nirenberg "for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis". However, Heinrich J. Matthaei broke the genetic code in 1961 with Nirenberg in their poly-U experiment at National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, paving the way for modern genetics. Matthaei was responsible for experimentally obtaining the first codon (nucleotide triple that usually specifies an amino acid) extract, while Nirenberg tampered with his initial, accurate results (due to his belief in 'less precise', 'more believable' data presentation). The 1962 prize was awarded to James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins "for their discoveries concerning the

title: Greg Winter
text: Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He continued to specialise in protein and nucleic acid sequencing and became a Group Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1981. He became interested in the idea that all antibodies have the same basic structure, with only small changes making them specific for one target. Georges Köhler and César Milstein had won the 1984 Nobel Prize for their work at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, in discovering a method to isolate and reproduce individual, or monoclonal, antibodies from among the multitude of different antibody proteins that the immune system makes to seek and

title: Asian Americans in science and technology
text: "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibres for optical communication." Shuji Nakamura won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes. Charles J. Pedersen shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his methods of synthesizing crown ethers. In 2008, biochemist Roger Tsien won the Nobel in Chemistry for his work on engineering and improving the green fluorescent protein (GFP) that has become a standard tool of modern molecular biology and biochemistry. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan won the prize in Chemistry "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". Ching W.

title: Greg Winter
text: them. For these developments Winter was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with George Smith and Frances Arnold. He is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and was appointed Master of Trinity College, Cambridge on 2 October 2012. From 2006 to 2011, he was Deputy Director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Medical Research Council, acting Director from 2007 to 2008 and Head of the Division of Protein and Nucleic Acids Chemistry from 1994 to 2006. He was also Deputy Director of the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering from 1990 to its closure in 2010. Winter was educated

title: Har Gobind Khorana
text: The Nobel web site states that it was "for their interpretation of the genetic code and its function in protein synthesis". Har Gobind Khorana's role is stated as follows: he "made important contributions to this field by building different RNA chains with the help of enzymes. Using these enzymes, he was able to produce proteins. The amino acid sequences of these proteins then solved the rest of the puzzle." He became a US citizen in 1966. Beginning in 1970, Khorana was the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later, a member

title: Evolutionary landscape
text: as higher taxonomic levels. The concept of evolutionary landscapes changed once more as we entered the era of molecular evolution. It is claimed Maynard Smith (1970) is the first to visualize protein evolution as a network of proteins one mutational step away from others. However, for this to be true, there must be pathways between functional proteins. Acknowledging the work of Kimura, King, and Jukes (the neutral theory of molecular evolution), Maynard Smith realized the proteins along such pathways could have equal functionality or be neutral. In other words, not all moves in evolution are "uphill." In 1984, Gillespie adapted

title: Hershey–Chase experiment
text: cell, but most of their protein does not. Although the results were not conclusive, and Hershey and Chase were cautious in their interpretation, previous, contemporaneous, and subsequent discoveries all served to prove that DNA is the hereditary material. Hershey shared the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Max Delbrück and Salvador Luria for their “discoveries concerning the genetic structure of viruses.” In the early twentieth century, biologists thought that proteins carried genetic information. This was based on the belief that proteins were more complex than DNA. Phoebus Levene's influential "tetranucleotide hypothesis", which incorrectly proposed that DNA was a

title: Linus Pauling
text: discovery of the alpha helix and beta sheet is a fundamental foundation for the study of protein structure. Francis Crick acknowledged Pauling as the "father of molecular biology". His discovery of sickle cell anemia as a "molecular disease" opened the way toward examining genetically acquired mutations at a molecular level. Pauling's 1951 publication with Robert B. Corey and H. R. Branson, "The Structure of Proteins: Two Hydrogen-Bonded Helical Configurations of the Polypeptide Chain," was a key early finding in the then newly emerging field of molecular biology. This publication was honored by a Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Award from the

title: History of evolutionary thought
text: sequences. At the same time, increasingly powerful techniques for analyzing proteins, such as protein electrophoresis and sequencing, brought biochemical phenomena into realm of the synthetic theory of evolution. In the early 1960s, biochemists Linus Pauling and Emile Zuckerkandl proposed the molecular clock hypothesis (MCH): that sequence differences between homologous proteins could be used to calculate the time since two species diverged. By 1969, Motoo Kimura and others provided a theoretical basis for the molecular clock, arguing that—at the molecular level at least—most genetic mutations are neither harmful nor helpful and that mutation and genetic drift (rather than natural selection) cause

title: Michael Neuberger
text: head of the Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry division at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, alongside Mariann Bienz. He is most notable for discovering the mechanism of somatic hypermutation. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1993 and was awarded their GlaxoSmithKline Prize in 2003. He also received the Novartis medal in 2002 and delivered the Novartis medal lecture, entitled "Antibodies: a Paradigm for the Evolution of Molecular Recognition" on 9 April 2002 at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. He was the son of Albert Neuberger, the brother of David Neuberger, James