John Fenn of Virginia Commonwealth University and Koichi Tanaka of Shimadzu are two of the three winners of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They will receive the prize for their work developing soft ionization techniques for studying large biological molecules, such as proteins, by mass spectrometry. The other half of the prize goes to Kurt W thrich, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Scripps Research Institute, for using NMR to study protein structure in solution.