Nobel Prize
Nobel in chemistry goes to 3 for “snapping molecules together”
This year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded in equal parts to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless for developing way of “snapping molecules together” that can be used to design medicines.
Their work, known as click chemistry and bioorthogonal reactions, is used to make cancer drugs, map DNA and create materials that are tailored to a specific purpose.
Hans Ellegren, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, announced the winners Wednesday at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
Bertozzi is based at Stanford University in California, Meldal is at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Sharpless is affiliated with Scripps Research, California.
Sharpless previously won a Nobel Prize in 2001. He is the fifth person to receive the award twice.
Last year the prize was awarded to scientists Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan for finding an ingenious and environmentally cleaner way to build molecules that the Nobel panel said is “already benefiting humankind greatly.”
A week of Nobel Prize announcements kicked off Monday with Swedish scientist Svante Paabo receiving the award in medicine for unlocking secrets of Neanderthal DNA that provided key insights into our immune system.
Three scientists jointly won the prize in physics Tuesday. Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger had shown that tiny particles can retain a connection with each other even when separated, a phenomenon known as quantum entanglement, that can be used for specialized computing and to encrypt information.
The awards continue with literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Monday.
The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out on Dec. 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895.
Swedish scientist Svante Pääbo wins Nobel in medicine for research on evolution
2022 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to Swedish scientist Svante Pääbo for his discoveries on human evolution.
Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel Committee, announced the winner Monday at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
The medicine prize kicked off a week of Nobel Prize announcements. It continues Tuesday with the physics prize, with chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Oct. 10.
Read Russian journalist sells Nobel Prize for Ukrainian children
The winner, or winners, of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine will be announced Monday at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
Among the researchers who may be honored this year are those who were instrumental in the development of the mRNA technology that went into COVID-19 vaccines, which saved millions of lives across the world.
Last year's recipients were David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.
Read 5 things to know about the Nobel prizes
The medicine prize kicks off a week of Nobel Prize announcements. It continues Tuesday with the physics prize, with chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Oct. 10.
The 2022 Nobel prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out on Dec. 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.
Russian journalist sells Nobel Prize for Ukrainian children
What’s the price of peace?
That question could be partially answered Monday night when Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov auctions off his Nobel Peace Prize medal. The proceeds will go directly to UNICEF in its efforts to help children displaced by the war in Ukraine.
Muratov, awarded the gold medal in October 2021, helped found the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and was the publication’s editor-in-chief when it shut down in March amid the Kremlin’s clampdown on journalists and public dissent in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It was Muratov’s idea to auction off his prize, having already announced he was donating the accompanying $500,000 cash award to charity. The idea of the donation, he said, “is to give the children refugees a chance for a future.”
In an interview with The Associated Press, Muratov said he was particularly concerned about children who have been orphaned because of the conflict in Ukraine.
“We want to return their future,” he said.
He added that it’s important international sanctions levied against Russia do not prevent humanitarian aid, such as medicine for rare diseases and bone marrow transplants, from reaching those in need.
Read: Zelenskyy Father's Day post spotlights family ties amid war
“It has to become a beginning of a flash mob as an example to follow so people auction their valuable possessions to help Ukrainians,” Muratov said in a video released by Heritage Auctions, which is handling the sale but not taking any share of the proceeds.
Muratov shared the Nobel Peace Prize last year with journalist Maria Ressa of the Philippines.
The two journalists, who each received their own medals, were honored for their battles to preserve free speech in their respective countries, despite coming under attack by harassment, their governments and even death threats.
Muratov has been highly critical of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the war launched in February that has caused nearly 5 million Ukrainians to flee to other countries for safety, creating the largest humanitarian crisis in Europe since World War II.
Independent journalists in Russia have come under scrutiny by the Kremlin, if not outright targets of the government. Since Putin came into power more than two decades ago, nearly two dozen journalists have been killed, including at least four who had worked for Muratov’s newspaper.
In April, Muratov said he was attacked with red paint while aboard a Russian train.
Muratov left Russia for Western Europe on Thursday to begin his trip to New York City, where live bidding will begin Monday afternoon.
Read: Morale is concern as NATO chief warns war could last ‘years’
Online bids began June 1 to coincide with the International Children’s Day observance. Monday’s live bidding falls on World Refugee Day.
As of early Monday morning, the high bid was $550,000. The purchase price is expected to spiral upward, possibly into the millions.
“It’s a very bespoke deal,” said Joshua Benesh, the chief strategy officer for Heritage Auctions. “Not everyone in the world has a Nobel Prize to auction and not every day of the week that there’s a Nobel Prize crossing the auction block.”
Since its inception in 1901, there have been nearly 1,000 recipients of the Nobel Prizes honoring achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and the advancement of peace.
The most ever paid for a Nobel Prize medal was in 2014, when James Watson, whose co-discovery of the structure of DNA earned him a Nobel Prize in 1962, sold his medal for $4.76 million. Three years later, the family of his co-recipient, Francis Crick, received $2.27 million in bidding run by Heritage Auctions, the same company that is auctioning off Muratov’s medal.
Melted down, the 175 grams of 23-karat gold contained in Muratov’s medal would be worth about $10,000.
The ongoing war and international humanitarian efforts to alleviate the suffering of those affected in Ukraine are bound to stoke interest, Benesh said, adding it’s hard to predict how much someone would be willing to pay for the medal.
“I think there’s certainly going to be some excitement Monday,” Benesh said. “It’s it’s such a unique item being sold under unique circumstances ... a significant act of generosity, and such a significant humanitarian crisis.”
Muratov and Heritage officials said even those out of the bidding can still help by donating directly to UNICEF.
3 US-based economists win Nobel for research on wages, jobs
A U.S.-based economist won the Nobel prize in economics Monday for pioneering research that transformed widely held ideas about the labor force, showing how an increase in the minimum wage doesn’t hinder hiring and immigrants don't lower pay for native-born workers. Two others shared the award for developing ways to study these types of societal issues.
Canadian-born David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded half of the prize for his research on how the minimum wage, immigration and education affect the labor market.
The other half was shared by Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dutch-born Guido Imbens of Stanford University for their framework for studying issues that can't rely on traditional scientific methods.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the three “completely reshaped empirical work in the economic sciences.”
Together, they helped rapidly expand the use of “natural experiments,” or studies based on observing real-world data. Such research made economics more applicable to everyday life, provided policymakers with actual evidence on the outcomes of policies, and in time spawned a more popular approach to economics epitomized by the blockbuster bestseller “Freakonomics,” by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt.
Read: Russian Nobel winner: Peace Prize is for my paper, not me
In a study published in 1993, Card looked at what happened to jobs at Burger King, KFC, Wendy's and Roy Rogers when New Jersey raised its minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.05, using restaurants in bordering eastern Pennsylvania as the control — or comparison — group. Contrary to previous studies, he and his late research partner Alan Krueger found that an increase in the minimum wage had no effect on the number of employees.
Card and Krueger's research fundamentally altered economists’ views of such policies. As noted by the Economist magazine, in 1992 a survey of the American Economic Association’s members found that 79% agreed that a minimum wage law increased unemployment among younger and lower-skilled workers. Those views were largely based on traditional economic notions of supply and demand: If you raise the price of something, you get less of it.
By 2000, however, just 46% of the AEA’s members said minimum wage laws increase unemployment, largely because of Card and Krueger.
Their findings sparked interest in further research into why a higher minimum wouldn’t reduce employment. One conclusion was that companies are able to pass on the cost of higher wages to customers by raising prices. In other cases, if a company is a major employer in a particular area, it may be able to keep wages particularly low, so that it could afford to pay a higher minimum, when required to do so, without cutting jobs. The higher pay would also attract more applicants, boosting labor supply.
Their paper "has shaken up the field at a very fundamental level,” said Arindrajit Dube, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “And so for that reason, and all the following research that their work ignited, this is a richly deserved award.”
Krueger would almost certainly have shared in the award, Dube said, but the economics Nobel isn't given posthumously. Krueger, Imbens said, co-authored papers with all three winners.
Krueger, who died in 2019 at age 58, taught at Princeton for three decades and was chief Labor Department economist under President Bill Clinton. He also was Obama’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Card and Krueger's paper made a huge impact on other economists. Lisa Cook, an economics professor at Michigan State University, said their paper was “a revelation” that helped crystallize her thinking for her research on racial violence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and how it inhibited patent filings by Black Americans.
Card's research also found that an influx of immigrants into a city doesn't cost native workers jobs or lower their earnings, though earlier immigrants can be negatively affected.
Read: Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah awarded Nobel literature prize
Card studied the labor market in Miami in the wake of Cuba’s sudden decision to let people emigrate in 1980, leading 125,000 people to leave in what became known as the Mariel Boatlift. It resulted in a 7% increase in the city’s workforce. By comparing the evolution of wages and employment in four other cities, Card discovered no negative effects for Miami residents with low levels of education. Follow-up work showed that increased immigration can have a positive impact on income for people born in the country.
Angrist and Imbens won their half of the award for working out the methodological issues that allow economists to draw solid conclusions about cause and effect even where they cannot carry out studies according to strict scientific methods.
Card's work on the minimum wage is one of the best-known natural experiments in economics. The problem with such experiments is that it can be difficult to isolate cause and effect. For example, if you want to figure out whether an extra year of education will increase a person’s income, you cannot simply compare the incomes of adults with one more year of schooling to those without.
That's because there are many other factors that might determine whether those who got an extra year of schooling are able to make more money. Perhaps they are harder workers or more diligent and would have done better than those without the extra year even if they did not stay in school. These kinds of issues cause economists and other social science researchers to say “correlation doesn’t prove causation.”
Imbens and Angrist, however, figured out how to isolate the effects of things like an extra year of school. Their methods enabled researchers to draw clearer conclusions about cause and effect, even if they are unable to control who gets things like extra education, the way scientists in a lab can control their experiments.
Imbens, in one paper, used a survey of lottery winners to evaluate the impact of a government-provided basic income, which has been proposed by left-leaning politicians in the U.S. and Europe. He found that a prize of $15,000 a year did not have much effect on a person's likelihood to work.
Card said he thought the voice message that came in at 2 a.m. from someone from Sweden was a prank until he saw the number on his phone really was from Sweden.
He said he and his co-author Kreuger faced disbelief from other economists about their findings. “At the time, the conclusions were somewhat controversial. Quite a few economists were skeptical of our results,” he said.
Imbens' wife, Susan Athey, is also an economist and president-elect of the AEA, and Imbens said they sometimes argue about economics in front of their three children.
“This means, I hope, they'll learn that they need to listen to me a little bit more,” he said. ”I'm afraid it probably won't work out that way."
At home in Brookline, Massachusetts, Angrist said: “I can hardly believe it. It's only been a few hours and I am still trying to absorb it."
Read:Physics Nobel rewards work on climate change, other forces
He also missed the call from Nobel officials and awoke to a torrent of texts from friends. Fortunately, he said, he knew enough other Nobel Laureates that he got a callback number from them.
As a youth, Angrist dropped out of a master's program in economics at Hebrew University in Israel, although he did meet his future wife, Mira, there. He has dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship.
“I did have sort of a winding road,” he said. “I wasn't a precocious high school student.”
The award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1.14 million).
Unlike the other Nobel prizes, the economics award wasn’t established in the will of Alfred Nobel but by the Swedish central bank in his memory in 1968, with the first winner selected a year later. It is the last prize announced each year.
3 US-based economists receive economics Nobel Prize
Three U.S-based economists won the 2021 Nobel prize for economics on Monday for work on drawing conclusions from unintended experiments, or so-called “natural experiments.”
David Card of the University of California at Berkeley was awarded one half of the prize, while the other half was shared by Joshua Angrist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Guido Imbens from Stanford University.
Read: Journalists from Philippines, Russia get Nobel Peace Prize
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the three have “completely reshaped empirical work in the economic sciences.”
“Card’s studies of core questions for society and Angrist and Imbens’ methodological contributions have shown that natural experiments are a rich source of knowlege,” said Peter Fredriksson, chair of the Economic Sciences Committee. “Their research has substantially improved our ability to answer key causal questions, which has been of great benefit for society.”
Unlike the other Nobel prizes, the economics award wasn’t established in the will of Alfred Nobel but by the Swedish central bank in his memory in 1968, with the first winner selected a year later. It is the last prize announced each year.
Read:Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah awarded Nobel literature prize
Last week, the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to journalists Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia for their fight for freedom of expression in countries where reporters have faced persistent attacks, harassment and even murder.
Ressa was the only woman honored this year in any category.
The Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to U.K.-based Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, who was recognized for his “uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee.”
The prize for physiology or medicine went to Americans David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.
Read: Nobel in chemistry honors 'greener' way to build molecules
Three scientists won the physics prize for work that found order in seeming disorder, helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including expanding our understanding of climate change.
Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan won the chemistry prize for finding an easier and environmentally cleaner way to build molecules that can be used to make compounds, including medicines and pesticides.
Journalists from Philippines, Russia get Nobel Peace Prize
Journalists Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their fight for freedom of expression in countries where media outlets have faced persistent attacks.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee stressed that an independent press is vital in promoting peace.
“Free, independent and fact-based journalism serves to protect against abuse of power, lies and war propaganda,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the committee, explaining why the prize was awarded to two journalists.
Read:Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah awarded Nobel literature prize
“Without freedom of expression and freedom of the press, it will be difficult to successfully promote fraternity between nations, disarmament and a better world order to succeed in our time," she said.
Ressa in 2012 co-founded Rappler, a news website that has focused “critical attention on the (President Rodrigo) Duterte regime’s controversial, murderous anti-drug campaign,” the Nobel committee said.
She and Rappler “have also documented how social media is being used to spread fake news, harass opponents and manipulate public discourse.”
Reacting to the news, Ressa told Norway’s TV2 channel that “the government (of the Philippines) will obviously not be happy,”
“I’m a little shocked. It’s really emotional," she added. “But I am happy on behalf of my team and would like to thank the Nobel Committee for recognizing what we are going through.”
The award-winning journalist was last year convicted of libel and sentenced to jail in a decision seen as a major blow to press global freedom. She was the first woman to win a Nobel this year.
Muratov was one of the founders of the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta in 1993.
“Novaya Gazeta is the most independent newspaper in Russia today, with a fundamentally critical attitude towards power,” the Nobel committee said.
“The newspaper’s fact-based journalism and professional integrity have made it an important source of information on censurable aspects of Russian society rarely mentioned by other media,” it added.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 17 media workers were killed in the Philippines in the last decade and 23 in Russia.
The Nobel committee noted that since the launch of Novaya Gazeta, six of its journalists have been killed, among them Anna Politkovskaya who covered Russia’s bloody conflict in Chechnya.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov praised Muratov as a “talented and brave” person.
“We can congratulate Dmitry Muratov — he has consistently worked in accordance with his ideals,” Peskov said in a conference call with reporters.
Reiss-Andersen noted that the peace prize has gone to journalists in the past, including Ernesto Teodoro Moneta of Italy who was cited in 1907 “for his work in the press and in peace meetings.”
In 1935, German journalist Carl von Ossietzky was awarded the prize “for his burning love for freedom of thought and expression” after revealing that the Nazi regime was secretly re-arming in breach of the World War I peace accord.
Read:Nobel in chemistry honors 'greener' way to build molecules
Ressa has been particularly critical also of the role of tech companies such as Facebook in manipulating public debate, and their failure to curb hate speech.
Speaking on Rappler's site after the award was announced, Ressa said that the “virus of lies that has been introduced through the algorithms of the social media platforms, it infects real people and changes.”
Physics Nobel rewards work on climate change, other forces
Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for work that found order in seeming disorder, helping to explain and predict complex forces of nature, including expanding our understanding of climate change.
Syukuro Manabe, originally from Japan, and Klaus Hasselmann of Germany were cited for their work in developing forecast models of Earth’s climate and "reliably predicting global warming.” The second half of the prize went to Giorgio Parisi of Italy for explaining disorder in physical systems, ranging from those as small as the insides of atoms to the planet-sized.
Hasselmann told The Associated Press that he “would rather have no global warming and no Nobel Prize.’’
Manabe said that figuring out the physics behind climate change was “1,000 times” easier than getting the world to do something about it. He said the intricacies of policy and society are far harder to fathom than the complexities of carbon dioxide interacting with the atmosphere, which then changes conditions in the ocean and on the land, which then alters the air again in a constant cycle.
He called climate change “a major crisis.”
Read: Nobel physics prize goes to 3 for climate discoveries
The prize comes less than four weeks before the start of high-level climate negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland, where world leaders will be asked to ramp up their commitments to curb global warming.
The Nobel-winning scientists used their moment in the limelight to urge action.
“It’s very urgent that we take very strong decisions and move at a very strong pace” in tackling global warming, Parisi said. He made the appeal even though his share of the prize was for work in a different area of physics.
All three scientists work on what are known as “complex systems,” of which climate is just one example. But the prize went to two fields of study that are opposite in many ways, though they share the goal of making sense of what seems random and chaotic so that it can be predicted.
Parisi’s research largely centers around subatomic particles, predicting how they move in seemingly chaotic ways and why, and is somewhat esoteric, while the work by Manabe and Hasselmann is about large-scale global forces that shape our daily lives.
The judges said Manabe, 90, and Hasselmann, 89, “laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how human actions influence it."
Starting in the 1960s, Manabe, now based at Princeton University, created the first climate models that forecast what would happen as carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere.
Scientists for decades had shown that carbon dioxide traps heat, but Manabe's work offered specifics. It allowed scientists to eventually show how climate change will worsen and how fast, depending on how much carbon pollution is spewed.
Manabe is such a pioneer that other climate scientists called his 1967 paper with the late Richard Wetherald “the most influential climate paper ever,” said NASA chief climate modeler Gavin Schmidt. Manabe's Princeton colleague Tom Delworth called Manabe “the Michael Jordan of climate.”
“Suki set the stage for today's climate science, not just the tool but also how to use it,” said fellow Princeton climate scientist Gabriel Vecchi. “I can't count the times that I thought I came up with something new, and it's in one of his papers.”
Read: 2 win medicine Nobel for showing how we react to heat, touch
Manabe's models from 50 years ago “accurately predicted the warming that actually occurred in the following decades," said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the Breakthrough Institute. Manabe's work serves “as a warning to us all that we should take their projections of a much warmer future if we keep emitting carbon dioxide quite seriously.”
“I never imagined that this thing I would begin to study has such a huge consequence,” Manabe said at a Princeton news conference. "I was doing it just because of my curiosity.”
About a decade after Manabe's initial work, Hasselmann, of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, helped explain why climate models can be reliable despite the seemingly chaotic nature of the weather. He also developed ways to look for specific signs of human influence on the climate.
Meanwhile, Parisi, of Sapienza University of Rome, “built a deep physical and mathematical model” that made it possible to understand complex systems in fields as different as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning.
His work originally focused on so-called spin glass, a type of metal alloy whose behavior long baffled scientists. Parisi, 73, discovered hidden patterns that explained the way it acted, creating theories that could be applied to other fields of research, too.
All three physicists used complex mathematics to explain and predict what seemed like chaotic forces of nature. That is known as modeling.
“Physics-based climate models made it possible to predict the amount and pace of global warming, including some of the consequences like rising seas, increased extreme rainfall events and stronger hurricanes, decades before they could be observed,” said German climate scientist and modeler Stefan Rahmstorf. He called Hasselmann and Manabe pioneers in this field.
When climate scientists with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, some who deny global warming dismissed it as a political move. Perhaps anticipating controversy, members of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel, emphasized that Tuesday's was a science prize.
“What we are saying is that the modeling of climate is solidly based on physical theory and well-known physics,” Swedish physicist Thors Hans Hansson said at the announcement.
Read: Nobel Prize honors discovery of temperature, touch receptors
For a scientist who trades in predictions, Hasselmann said the prize caught him off guard.
“I was quite surprised when they called,” he said. “I mean, this is something I did many years ago.”
But Parisi said: “I knew there was a non-negligible possibility” of winning.
The award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1.14 million). The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.
On Monday, the Nobel in medicine was awarded to Americans David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.
Over the coming days prizes will be awarded in the fields of chemistry, literature, peace and economics.
Nobel physics prize goes to 3 for climate discoveries
The Nobel Prize for physics has been awarded to scientists from Japan, Germany and Italy.
Syukuro Manabe, 90, and Klaus Hasselmann, 89, were cited for their work in “the physical modeling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”.
The second half of the prize was awarded to Giorgio Parisi, 73, for “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.”
The panel said Manabe and Hasselmann “laid the foundation of our knowledge of the Earth’s climate and how humanity influences it.
Read: 2 win medicine Nobel for showing how we react to heat, touch
Starting in the 1960s, Manabe demonstrated how increases in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would increase global temperatures, laying the foundations for current climate models.
About a decade later, Hasselmann created a model that linked weather and climate, helping explain why climate models can be reliable despite the seemingly chaotic nature of the weather.
He also developed ways to look for specific signs of human influence on the climate.
Parisi “built a deep physical and mathematical model” that made it possible to understand complex systems in fields as different as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning.
After the announcement, Parisi said that “it’s very urgent that we take very strong decisions and move at a very strong pace” in tackling climate change.
“It’s clear for future generations that we have to act now,” he said.
Read:2 Americans win Nobel prize in economics for auction theory
The winners were announced Tuesday by Goran Hansson, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
It is common for several scientists who work in related fields to share the prize.
The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1.14 million). The prize money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.
On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize in physiology or medicine to Americans David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch.
Over the coming days prizes will also be awarded for outstanding work in the fields of chemistry, literature, peace and economics.
2 win medicine Nobel for showing how we react to heat, touch
Two scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for their discoveries into how the human body perceives temperature and touch, revelations that could lead to new ways of treating pain or even heart disease.
Americans David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian separately identified receptors in the skin that respond to heat and pressure, and researchers are working on drugs to target them. Some hope the discoveries could eventually lead to pain treatments that reduce dependence on highly addictive opioids. But the breakthroughs, which happened decades ago, have not yet yielded many effective new therapies.
Julius, of the University of California at San Francisco, used capsaicin, the active component in chili peppers, to help pinpoint the nerve sensors that respond to heat, the Nobel Committee said. Patapoutian, of Scripps Research Institute at La Jolla, California, found pressure-sensitive sensors in cells that respond to mechanical stimulation.
“This really unlocks one of the secrets of nature,” said Thomas Perlmann, secretary-general of the committee, in announcing the winners. “It’s actually something that is crucial for our survival, so it’s a very important and profound discovery.”
Read: Nobel Prize honors discovery of temperature, touch receptors
The committee said their discoveries get at “one of the great mysteries facing humanity”: how we sense our environment.
The choice of winners underscored how little scientists knew about that question before the discoveries — and how much there still is to learn, said Oscar Marin, director of the MRC Centre for Neurodevelopmental Disorders at King’s College London.
“While we understood the physiology of the senses, what we didn’t understand was how we sensed differences in temperature or pressure,” Marin said. “Knowing how our body senses these changes is fundamental because once we know those molecules, they can be targeted. It’s like finding a lock, and now we know the precise keys that will be necessary to unlock it.”
Marin predicted that new treatments for pain would likely come first, but that understanding how the body detects changes in pressure could eventually lead to drugs for heart disease, if scientists can figure out how to alleviate pressure on blood vessels and other organs.
Richard Harris, of the Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center at the University of Michigan, also said the new laureates’ work might help design new pain medications, but noted the field has long been stalled.
He said that because pain also includes a psychological component, simply identifying how it is triggered in the body isn’t necessarily enough to address it. Still, he said Julius’ and Patapoutian’s work would likely help doctors better treat pain that is caused by things like extreme temperatures and chemical burns.
“Their discoveries are giving us the first inkling of how this type of pain starts, but whether it’s involved in many chronic pain patients remains to be seen,” he said.
Still, Fiona Boissonade, a pain specialist at the University of Sheffield, said the Nobel laureates' work was especially relevant for the one in five people globally that suffer from chronic pain.
Read:Medicine award kicks off week of Nobel Prize announcements
Such pain — including from arthritis, migraines and chronic back problems — "is a huge medical problem, and it’s quite poorly treated across the board,” she said. “Their research may lead us to identify new compounds that are effective in treating pain that don't come with the devastating impact of opioids,” which have spawned a crisis of addiction in the U.S.
In keeping with a long tradition of difficulties in alerting Nobel winners, Julius said he was awakened by what he thought was a prank phone call shortly before the prize was announced.
“My phone sort of bleeped, and it was from a relative who had been contacted by somebody on the Nobel Committee trying to find my phone number,” he said from his home in San Francisco, where it was the middle of the night.
It was only when his wife heard Perlmann’s voice and confirmed it was indeed the secretary-general of the committee who was calling, that he realized it wasn’t a joke. Julius said his wife had worked with Perlmann years ago.
Julius, 65, later said he hoped his work would lead to the development of new pain drugs, explaining that the biology behind even everyday activities can have enormous significance.
“We eat chili peppers and menthol, but oftentimes, you don’t think about how that works,” he said.
The Nobel Committee tweeted a photo of Patapoutian in bed with his son while he watched the announcement on his computer.
Read: 2 Americans win Nobel prize in economics for auction theory
“A day to be thankful: this country gave me a chance with a great education and support for basic research. And for my labbies and collaborators for partnering with me,” Patapoutian, who was born in Lebanon, tweeted.
When the team made the discovery in 2009, “we were of course so excited and literally jumping up and down. It was something we were looking for for years," Patapoutian said at a news conference.
Patapoutian is paid by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which also supports The Associated Press’ Health and Science Department. Julius is an HHMI trustee.
The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1.14 million). The prize money comes from a bequest left by the prize's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.
The prize is the first to be awarded this year. The other prizes are for outstanding work in the fields of physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics.
Nobel Prize honors discovery of temperature, touch receptors
The Nobel Prize in the field of physiology or medicine has been awarded to U.S. scientists David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian.
They were cited for their discovery of receptors for temperature and touch.
Read: Medicine award kicks off week of Nobel Prize announcements
The winners were announced Monday by Thomas Perlmann, secretary-general of the Nobel Committee.
The first of the 2021 Nobel Prizes is announced Monday with the naming of the winner, or winners, in the field of physiology or medicine.
A panel at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announced the recipient after 11:30 a.m. (0930 GMT).
Last year's prize went to three scientists who discovered the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus, a breakthrough that led to cures for the deadly disease and tests to keep the scourge from spreading though blood banks.
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The Nobel Assembly often commends basic science, but practical applications are also sometimes recognized. This could boost the chances of those involved in developing vaccines against the coronavirus getting the prize.
The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1.14 million). The prize money comes from a bequest left by the prize's creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.
The other prizes are for outstanding work in the fields of physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics.