Nobel prize in chemistry awarded for pioneering work on proteins – live

Americans Frances H Arnold and George P Smith and Briton Gregory P Winter will share the prize of 9m Swedish kronor (770,000)

• Frances H Arnold, George P Smith and Gregory P Winter win Nobel prize in chemistry

12.25pm BST

And there we have it: the Nobel science prizes are done for another year. Yes, the awards come in for a lot of stick, and much of it is justified. But they do force us to stand back and look at what scientists and engineers have achieved. On Monday, we saw the medicine prize awarded for checkpoint inhibitors, the radical new drugs that help direct the full force of the immune system on to cancer. On Tuesday, the physics prize went to the sci-fi technology of optical tweezers, which allow researchers to hold live bacteria in beams of light. The same prize also celebrated the development of intense, ultrashort laser pulses, now used in corrective eye surgery millions of times a year. And today, of course, the chemistry prize went for the transformational methods of directed evolution and phage display. Along the way, Donna Strickland at the University of Waterloo became the first woman to win the Nobel prize in physics for 55 years; Frances Arnold became only the fifth woman to win the chemistry prize; and Arthur Ashkin, aged 96, became the oldest person to receive any Nobel prize. Congratulations to them all. Thanks to everyone who joined us for the ride. Until next year, bye bye.

12.07pm BST

I'll wrap up with some wonderful words from George Smith, reached by the Associated Press shortly after he won the prize. I can't think of another laureate who has so clearly stressed the importance of the work they built on.

Very few research breakthroughs are novel. Virtually all of them build on what went on before. It's happenstance. That was certainly the case with my work. Mine was an idea in a line of research that built very naturally on the lines of research that went before.

It's a standard joke that someone with a Swedish accent calls and says you won! But there was so much static on the line, I knew it wasn't any of my friends.