The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1930 was awarded to Hans Fischer "for his researches into the constitution of haemin and chlorophyll and especially for his synthesis of haemin".
 

Two of the most fundamental processes in life, the transport of oxygen by blood in animals and the absorption of light during photosynthesis in plants, rely on pigments to carry out their highly important missions. Chemists knew that haemoglobin, the complex oxygen-transporting molecule in blood, can be divided into one portion that contains the red pigment and another so-called protein part. Structural similarities between haemoglobin and the plant pigment chlorophyll had been uncovered by the 1915 Chemistry Laureate Richard Willstätter, when he showed that chlorophyll holds an atom of magnesium within the centre of the molecule in the same way in which iron is held within haemin.