This year’s Nobel prize in chemistry went to Frances Arnold, George Smith and Sir Gregory Winter. Dr Arnold created synthetic enzymes by “directed evolution”. Dr Smith invented phage display, a technique that can be used to drive the evolution of new proteins. And Dr Winter used phage display to direct the evolution of antibodies, eventually creating one that is used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease
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https://www.economist.com/science-and-t ... rm=2018103
Nobel Prizes
The 2018 Nobel peace prize is awarded to a surgeon and a former slave
Two campaigners fighting against rape as a weapon of war have shone a light on a horrible tactic
Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions that some readers may find distressing
WHEN Dr Denis Mukwege first saw the injuries of a woman who had been raped by a soldier, he was appalled. It was not just the hideousness of the crime. It was the pitiless planning behind it. During the war in eastern Congo, militia commanders orchestrated campaigns of mass rape to terrorise the whole population into submission. “I couldn't imagine that could be done as a strategy,” Dr Mukwege told The Economist. Since qualifying as a gynaecologist—one of the very few in the Democratic Republic of Congo—he has operated on some 20,000 survivors of sexual violence and devoted his life to publicising their plight.
Nadia Murad’s story is, if anything, more harrowing. She was a quiet, studious 21-year-old when Islamic State arrived in her village in Iraq in 2014. The jihadists separated the men from the women and murdered the men, including six of Ms Murad’s brothers and stepbrothers. They murdered the older women, too, including Ms Murad’s mother. Then they took the young women and sold them as sex slaves. Explicitly, at a slave market. Ms Murad was one of thousands to be violated by men who argued that they were doing their victims a favour, because they were infidels and would have a chance to become Muslims.
Since she escaped, she too has been a tireless campaigner against rape as a weapon of war, sharing her story no matter how much it hurts to tell it, and urging the world to hold Islamic State accountable for the genocide of her people, the Yazidis, a minority faith in Iraq and Syria.
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https://www.economist.com/international ... rm=2018105
*****
Article by Nadia
Outraged by the Attacks on Yazidis? It Is Time to Help
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opin ... dline&te=1
Two campaigners fighting against rape as a weapon of war have shone a light on a horrible tactic
Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions that some readers may find distressing
WHEN Dr Denis Mukwege first saw the injuries of a woman who had been raped by a soldier, he was appalled. It was not just the hideousness of the crime. It was the pitiless planning behind it. During the war in eastern Congo, militia commanders orchestrated campaigns of mass rape to terrorise the whole population into submission. “I couldn't imagine that could be done as a strategy,” Dr Mukwege told The Economist. Since qualifying as a gynaecologist—one of the very few in the Democratic Republic of Congo—he has operated on some 20,000 survivors of sexual violence and devoted his life to publicising their plight.
Nadia Murad’s story is, if anything, more harrowing. She was a quiet, studious 21-year-old when Islamic State arrived in her village in Iraq in 2014. The jihadists separated the men from the women and murdered the men, including six of Ms Murad’s brothers and stepbrothers. They murdered the older women, too, including Ms Murad’s mother. Then they took the young women and sold them as sex slaves. Explicitly, at a slave market. Ms Murad was one of thousands to be violated by men who argued that they were doing their victims a favour, because they were infidels and would have a chance to become Muslims.
Since she escaped, she too has been a tireless campaigner against rape as a weapon of war, sharing her story no matter how much it hurts to tell it, and urging the world to hold Islamic State accountable for the genocide of her people, the Yazidis, a minority faith in Iraq and Syria.
More...
https://www.economist.com/international ... rm=2018105
*****
Article by Nadia
Outraged by the Attacks on Yazidis? It Is Time to Help
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opin ... dline&te=1
The Nobel prize for economics is awarded for work on the climate and economic growth
WHY do economies grow, and why might growth outstrip the natural world’s capacity to sustain it? The answers to such questions have long eluded economists. But the profession’s progress towards cracking them is in large part because of this year’s recipients of the Nobel prize for economic sciences, Paul Romer (pictured, right) and William Nordhaus (pictured, left).
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https://www.economist.com/finance-and-e ... rm=2018108
WHY do economies grow, and why might growth outstrip the natural world’s capacity to sustain it? The answers to such questions have long eluded economists. But the profession’s progress towards cracking them is in large part because of this year’s recipients of the Nobel prize for economic sciences, Paul Romer (pictured, right) and William Nordhaus (pictured, left).
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https://www.economist.com/finance-and-e ... rm=2018108
Women in Rare Company Accept Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry
For the first time, female scientists had won the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics. And on Monday, they accepted their accolades at the same award ceremony in Stockholm.
For Donna Strickland, receiving the call two months ago that she had won the physics prize is the only feeling that can compare, she said, to the moment when she had her scientific breakthrough.
Her colleague had “wheeled his three cameras into my lab one night,” Dr. Strickland said in her acceptance speech, “and together we measured the compressed pulse width of the amplified pulses.”
“I will never forget that night,” she said. “It is truly an amazing feeling when you know that you have built something that no one else ever has and it actually works.”
........
For Dr. Arnold’s part, she pioneered the bioengineering method, which works similar to the way dog breeders mate specific dogs to bring out desired traits, in the early 1990s and has refined it since.
“With evolution in our hands, with the ability to set genetic diversity and tailor the forces of selection, we can now explore paths that nature has left unexplored,” Dr. Arnold said during her acceptance speech.
“We can select life and their chemistries to our benefit to create new sources of energy, to fix the carbon in our atmosphere, to cure disease, to make us younger, more beautiful, or we can make new weapons of terror or state control,” she added.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/scie ... dline&te=1
For the first time, female scientists had won the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics. And on Monday, they accepted their accolades at the same award ceremony in Stockholm.
For Donna Strickland, receiving the call two months ago that she had won the physics prize is the only feeling that can compare, she said, to the moment when she had her scientific breakthrough.
Her colleague had “wheeled his three cameras into my lab one night,” Dr. Strickland said in her acceptance speech, “and together we measured the compressed pulse width of the amplified pulses.”
“I will never forget that night,” she said. “It is truly an amazing feeling when you know that you have built something that no one else ever has and it actually works.”
........
For Dr. Arnold’s part, she pioneered the bioengineering method, which works similar to the way dog breeders mate specific dogs to bring out desired traits, in the early 1990s and has refined it since.
“With evolution in our hands, with the ability to set genetic diversity and tailor the forces of selection, we can now explore paths that nature has left unexplored,” Dr. Arnold said during her acceptance speech.
“We can select life and their chemistries to our benefit to create new sources of energy, to fix the carbon in our atmosphere, to cure disease, to make us younger, more beautiful, or we can make new weapons of terror or state control,” she added.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/scie ... dline&te=1
Karen Uhlenbeck Is First Woman to Win Abel Prize for Mathematics
Dr. Uhlenbeck helped pioneer geometric analysis, developing techniques now commonly used by many mathematicians.
For the first time, one of the top prizes in mathematics has been given to a woman.
On Tuesday, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced it has awarded this year’s Abel Prize — an award modeled on the Nobel Prizes — to Karen Uhlenbeck, an emeritus professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The award cites “the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics.”
One of Dr. Uhlenbeck’s advances in essence described the complex shapes of soap films not in a bubble bath but in abstract, high-dimensional curved spaces. In later work, she helped put a rigorous mathematical underpinning to techniques widely used by physicists in quantum field theory to describe fundamental interactions between particles and forces.
In the process, she helped pioneer a field known as geometric analysis, and she developed techniques now commonly used by many mathematicians.
“She did things nobody thought about doing,” said Sun-Yung Alice Chang, a mathematician at Princeton University who served on the five-member prize committee, “and after she did, she laid the foundations of a branch of mathematics.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/scie ... ogin-email
Dr. Uhlenbeck helped pioneer geometric analysis, developing techniques now commonly used by many mathematicians.
For the first time, one of the top prizes in mathematics has been given to a woman.
On Tuesday, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced it has awarded this year’s Abel Prize — an award modeled on the Nobel Prizes — to Karen Uhlenbeck, an emeritus professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The award cites “the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics.”
One of Dr. Uhlenbeck’s advances in essence described the complex shapes of soap films not in a bubble bath but in abstract, high-dimensional curved spaces. In later work, she helped put a rigorous mathematical underpinning to techniques widely used by physicists in quantum field theory to describe fundamental interactions between particles and forces.
In the process, she helped pioneer a field known as geometric analysis, and she developed techniques now commonly used by many mathematicians.
“She did things nobody thought about doing,” said Sun-Yung Alice Chang, a mathematician at Princeton University who served on the five-member prize committee, “and after she did, she laid the foundations of a branch of mathematics.”
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/scie ... ogin-email
Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Studies of Earth’s Place in the Universe
The cosmologist James Peebles split the prize with the astrophysicists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, for work the Nobel judges said “transformed our ideas about the cosmos.”
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists who transformed our view of the cosmos.
James Peebles, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, shared half of the prize for theories that explained how the universe swirled into galaxies and everything we see in the night sky, and indeed much that we cannot see.
The other half was shared by two Swiss astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who were the first to discover an exoplanet, or a planet circling around a sun-like star.
“They really, sort of tell us something very essential — existential — about our place in the universe,” Ulf Danielsson, a member of the Nobel committee, said during an interview broadcast on the web.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/scie ... ysics.html
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Nobel Prize in Medicine Awarded for Research on How Cells Manage Oxygen
The prize was awarded to William G. Kaelin Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza for discoveries about how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded to three scientists — William G. Kaelin Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza — for their work on how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.
The Nobel Assembly announced the prize at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on Monday.
Their work established the genetic mechanisms that allow cells to respond to changes in oxygen levels. The findings have implications for treating a variety of diseases, including cancer, anemia, heart attacks and strokes.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/heal ... ogin-email
The cosmologist James Peebles split the prize with the astrophysicists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, for work the Nobel judges said “transformed our ideas about the cosmos.”
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists who transformed our view of the cosmos.
James Peebles, a professor emeritus at Princeton University, shared half of the prize for theories that explained how the universe swirled into galaxies and everything we see in the night sky, and indeed much that we cannot see.
The other half was shared by two Swiss astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, who were the first to discover an exoplanet, or a planet circling around a sun-like star.
“They really, sort of tell us something very essential — existential — about our place in the universe,” Ulf Danielsson, a member of the Nobel committee, said during an interview broadcast on the web.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/scie ... ysics.html
********
Nobel Prize in Medicine Awarded for Research on How Cells Manage Oxygen
The prize was awarded to William G. Kaelin Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza for discoveries about how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded to three scientists — William G. Kaelin Jr., Peter J. Ratcliffe and Gregg L. Semenza — for their work on how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.
The Nobel Assembly announced the prize at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on Monday.
Their work established the genetic mechanisms that allow cells to respond to changes in oxygen levels. The findings have implications for treating a variety of diseases, including cancer, anemia, heart attacks and strokes.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/heal ... ogin-email
Nobel prize for chemistry: the lithium-ion battery
An overdue award for a ubiquitous invention
ALTHOUGH ALFRED NOBEL’S will states that the annual prizes bearing his name should be given to those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind”, the science awards have a tendency to end up in the hands of those who have made esoteric, if profound, advances. Not so with this year’s prize in chemistry. Three researchers—two from America and one from Japan—have been rewarded for their work in developing the lithium-ion battery.
Lithium-ion batteries have transformed society because they are lightweight and rechargeable. They have therefore become ubiquitous in everything from mobile phones, tablets and laptops to electric cars. They could also, in the future, become important in storing the intermittently available energy produced by renewable sources such as wind and solar power, as the world attempts to move away from fossil fuels.
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https://www.economist.com/science-and-t ... on-battery
An overdue award for a ubiquitous invention
ALTHOUGH ALFRED NOBEL’S will states that the annual prizes bearing his name should be given to those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind”, the science awards have a tendency to end up in the hands of those who have made esoteric, if profound, advances. Not so with this year’s prize in chemistry. Three researchers—two from America and one from Japan—have been rewarded for their work in developing the lithium-ion battery.
Lithium-ion batteries have transformed society because they are lightweight and rechargeable. They have therefore become ubiquitous in everything from mobile phones, tablets and laptops to electric cars. They could also, in the future, become important in storing the intermittently available energy produced by renewable sources such as wind and solar power, as the world attempts to move away from fossil fuels.
More...
https://www.economist.com/science-and-t ... on-battery
Nobel prizes for literature: Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke
The Swedish Academy’s decision to crown two European authors will delight and enrage readers around the world
IT WAS A SPECIAL edition of the Nobel prize in literature. Following the suspension of the award last year in the wake of a sexual-abuse scandal, on October 10th the Swedish Academy announced the winners of both the 2018 and 2019 medals. From shortlists of eight writers, they chose to crown Olga Tokarczuk, a Polish novelist, and Peter Handke, an Austrian playwright, scriptwriter and memoirist. Each writer will receive 9m Swedish krona ($907,000), a medal and a diploma.
Earlier this month, Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel prize in literature committee, had said that formerly the jurors “had a more Eurocentric perspective on literature,” but that now they “are looking all over the world”. So the triumph of two authors from Europe, which accounts for just 11% of the world’s population but three-quarters of the laureates since the Nobel prize was founded in 1901, will surprise those who had hoped the Academy might use its year of reflection to broaden its scope and acknowledge a writer from further afield. Early favourites were Maryse Conde, the empress of Caribbean literature; the celebrated Kenyan novelist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o; and Haruki Murakami from Japan.
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https://www.economist.com/prospero/2019 ... a/322904/n
The Swedish Academy’s decision to crown two European authors will delight and enrage readers around the world
IT WAS A SPECIAL edition of the Nobel prize in literature. Following the suspension of the award last year in the wake of a sexual-abuse scandal, on October 10th the Swedish Academy announced the winners of both the 2018 and 2019 medals. From shortlists of eight writers, they chose to crown Olga Tokarczuk, a Polish novelist, and Peter Handke, an Austrian playwright, scriptwriter and memoirist. Each writer will receive 9m Swedish krona ($907,000), a medal and a diploma.
Earlier this month, Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel prize in literature committee, had said that formerly the jurors “had a more Eurocentric perspective on literature,” but that now they “are looking all over the world”. So the triumph of two authors from Europe, which accounts for just 11% of the world’s population but three-quarters of the laureates since the Nobel prize was founded in 1901, will surprise those who had hoped the Academy might use its year of reflection to broaden its scope and acknowledge a writer from further afield. Early favourites were Maryse Conde, the empress of Caribbean literature; the celebrated Kenyan novelist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o; and Haruki Murakami from Japan.
More...
https://www.economist.com/prospero/2019 ... a/322904/n
Assessing Abiy Ahmed, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize
The record of Ethiopia’s prime minister remains incomplete, at home and abroad
THERE ARE two types of Nobel Peace Prize winner. The uncontroversial ones are often campaigners, such as Nadia Murad (who won last year for her work highlighting rape during war) or the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (which won in 2013). The controversial ones are often the politicians who actually negotiate peace deals—think of Yasser Arafat or F.W. de Klerk. Politics in violent places is a nasty, messy affair, and peace deals don’t always last. The award of the prize on October 11th to Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, will spark more debate than most.
On the plus side, Abiy has tried hard to be a unifier since he took office last year. He often uses the Amharic word medemer (to add together) in speeches. Millions of Ethiopians have welcomed his promises of democracy, reconciliation and reform in a country that had long been oppressed.
In June 2018 he signed a historic peace deal with Eritrea, a smaller neighbour that seceded from Ethiopia in 1993. The accord brought to a close two decades of pointless conflict over a scrap of barren land. The war had led to tens of thousands of deaths, ripped apart families and severed the deep ties of blood, culture and language between the two countries.
Abiy broke the deadlock by promising to withdraw from the disputed territories, thus implementing the findings of a UN commission that Ethiopia had long rejected. He also took advantage of his close relationship with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose financial largesse may have helped nudge Issaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s president, to the negotiating table. After the peace agreement, families and friends were reunited and cross-border trade flourished.
Berit Reiss-Andersen, the Nobel committee’s chair, said the prize recognised Abiy’s “efforts to achieve peace and international co-operation, and in particular his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea”. He has also been praised for helping to mediate a power-sharing accord between pro-democracy protesters and a military junta that took power earlier this year in Sudan.
More...
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-a ... eace-prize
The record of Ethiopia’s prime minister remains incomplete, at home and abroad
THERE ARE two types of Nobel Peace Prize winner. The uncontroversial ones are often campaigners, such as Nadia Murad (who won last year for her work highlighting rape during war) or the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (which won in 2013). The controversial ones are often the politicians who actually negotiate peace deals—think of Yasser Arafat or F.W. de Klerk. Politics in violent places is a nasty, messy affair, and peace deals don’t always last. The award of the prize on October 11th to Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, will spark more debate than most.
On the plus side, Abiy has tried hard to be a unifier since he took office last year. He often uses the Amharic word medemer (to add together) in speeches. Millions of Ethiopians have welcomed his promises of democracy, reconciliation and reform in a country that had long been oppressed.
In June 2018 he signed a historic peace deal with Eritrea, a smaller neighbour that seceded from Ethiopia in 1993. The accord brought to a close two decades of pointless conflict over a scrap of barren land. The war had led to tens of thousands of deaths, ripped apart families and severed the deep ties of blood, culture and language between the two countries.
Abiy broke the deadlock by promising to withdraw from the disputed territories, thus implementing the findings of a UN commission that Ethiopia had long rejected. He also took advantage of his close relationship with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose financial largesse may have helped nudge Issaias Afwerki, Eritrea’s president, to the negotiating table. After the peace agreement, families and friends were reunited and cross-border trade flourished.
Berit Reiss-Andersen, the Nobel committee’s chair, said the prize recognised Abiy’s “efforts to achieve peace and international co-operation, and in particular his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea”. He has also been praised for helping to mediate a power-sharing accord between pro-democracy protesters and a military junta that took power earlier this year in Sudan.
More...
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-a ... eace-prize
A Nobel economics prize goes to pioneers in understanding poverty
Using randomised trials help policymakers grasp which policies work and which don’t
THE MOST important question in economics is also the hardest: why do some countries stay poor while others grow rich? In 2015, 10% of the world’s population lived on less than $1.90 per day, down from 36% in 1990. But more than 700m people remain in extreme poverty, and the number grows every day in certain parts of the world, in particular sub-Saharan Africa. For their contributions to understanding gaps in development, the better to close them, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer have been awarded this year’s Nobel prize for economics. All three are Americans, though Mr Banerjee and Ms Duflo are immigrants (and married to each other). Ms Duflo is only the second woman to have received the prize and, at 46, the youngest winner ever.
Thirty years ago, economists mostly looked at the big picture. They studied large-scale structural transformations: from rural and agricultural to urban and industrial. Macroeconomists built growth theories around variables such as human capital, then ran cross-country growth regressions to try to measure relationships—for example, between years of schooling and GDP per person. But data were scarce or poor, and the vast number of potentially relevant factors made it hard to be sure what caused what.
In the mid-1990s Michael Kremer of Harvard University tried something different. With collaborators and co-authors, he began studying poverty with methods more commonly associated with chemists and biologists: randomised trials. If human capital—health, education, skills and so forth—is essential for development, then economists had better make sure they understand where it comes from. In Kenya he conducted field experiments in which schools were randomly divided into groups—some subject to a policy intervention and others not. He tested, among other things, additional textbooks, deworming treatments and financial incentives for teachers linked to their pupils’ progress.
More...
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-e ... ng-poverty
Using randomised trials help policymakers grasp which policies work and which don’t
THE MOST important question in economics is also the hardest: why do some countries stay poor while others grow rich? In 2015, 10% of the world’s population lived on less than $1.90 per day, down from 36% in 1990. But more than 700m people remain in extreme poverty, and the number grows every day in certain parts of the world, in particular sub-Saharan Africa. For their contributions to understanding gaps in development, the better to close them, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer have been awarded this year’s Nobel prize for economics. All three are Americans, though Mr Banerjee and Ms Duflo are immigrants (and married to each other). Ms Duflo is only the second woman to have received the prize and, at 46, the youngest winner ever.
Thirty years ago, economists mostly looked at the big picture. They studied large-scale structural transformations: from rural and agricultural to urban and industrial. Macroeconomists built growth theories around variables such as human capital, then ran cross-country growth regressions to try to measure relationships—for example, between years of schooling and GDP per person. But data were scarce or poor, and the vast number of potentially relevant factors made it hard to be sure what caused what.
In the mid-1990s Michael Kremer of Harvard University tried something different. With collaborators and co-authors, he began studying poverty with methods more commonly associated with chemists and biologists: randomised trials. If human capital—health, education, skills and so forth—is essential for development, then economists had better make sure they understand where it comes from. In Kenya he conducted field experiments in which schools were randomly divided into groups—some subject to a policy intervention and others not. He tested, among other things, additional textbooks, deworming treatments and financial incentives for teachers linked to their pupils’ progress.
More...
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-e ... ng-poverty
The Scandal of a Nobel Laureate
We live in an age that is losing the capacity to distinguish art from ideology and artists from politics.
Excerpt:
But part of the answer, too, is that we live in an age that is losing the capacity to distinguish art from ideology and artists from politics. “I’m standing at my garden gate and there are 50 journalists,” Handke complained on Tuesday, “and all of them just ask me questions like you do, and from not a single person who comes to me I hear they have read any of my works or know what I have written.” He has a point. He didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize or some other humanitarian award. His art deserves to be judged, or condemned, on its artistic merits alone.
What’s the alternative? Those who think that a core task of art is political instruction or moral uplift will wind up with some version of socialist realism or religious dogma. And those who think that the worth of art must be judged according to the moral and political commitments of its creator ultimately consign all art to the dustbin, since even the most avant-garde artists are creatures of their time.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/opin ... d=45305309
We live in an age that is losing the capacity to distinguish art from ideology and artists from politics.
Excerpt:
But part of the answer, too, is that we live in an age that is losing the capacity to distinguish art from ideology and artists from politics. “I’m standing at my garden gate and there are 50 journalists,” Handke complained on Tuesday, “and all of them just ask me questions like you do, and from not a single person who comes to me I hear they have read any of my works or know what I have written.” He has a point. He didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize or some other humanitarian award. His art deserves to be judged, or condemned, on its artistic merits alone.
What’s the alternative? Those who think that a core task of art is political instruction or moral uplift will wind up with some version of socialist realism or religious dogma. And those who think that the worth of art must be judged according to the moral and political commitments of its creator ultimately consign all art to the dustbin, since even the most avant-garde artists are creatures of their time.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/opin ... d=45305309
Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to 3 Scientists for Work on Black Holes
The prize was awarded half to Roger Penrose for showing how black holes could form and half to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for discovering a supermassive object at the Milky Way’s center.
The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astrophysicists Tuesday for work that was literally out of the world, and indeed the universe. They are Roger Penrose, an Englishman, Reinhard Genzel, a German, and Andrea Ghez, an American. They were recognized for their work on the gateways to eternity known as black holes, massive objects that swallow light and everything else forever that falls in their unsparing maws.
Dr. Penrose, a mathematician at Oxford University, was awarded half of the approximately $1.1 million prize for proving that black holes must exist if Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, known as general relativity, is right.
The second half was split between Dr. Genzel and Dr. Ghez for their relentless and decades long investigation of the dark monster here in the center of our own galaxy, gathering evidence to convict it of being a supermassive black hole.
Dr. Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, following Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/scie ... 778d3e6de3
The prize was awarded half to Roger Penrose for showing how black holes could form and half to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for discovering a supermassive object at the Milky Way’s center.
The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astrophysicists Tuesday for work that was literally out of the world, and indeed the universe. They are Roger Penrose, an Englishman, Reinhard Genzel, a German, and Andrea Ghez, an American. They were recognized for their work on the gateways to eternity known as black holes, massive objects that swallow light and everything else forever that falls in their unsparing maws.
Dr. Penrose, a mathematician at Oxford University, was awarded half of the approximately $1.1 million prize for proving that black holes must exist if Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, known as general relativity, is right.
The second half was split between Dr. Genzel and Dr. Ghez for their relentless and decades long investigation of the dark monster here in the center of our own galaxy, gathering evidence to convict it of being a supermassive black hole.
Dr. Ghez is only the fourth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, following Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and Donna Strickland in 2018.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/scie ... 778d3e6de3
This Year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry Honors a Revolution
With Crispr, two scientists turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race.
When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled “The Double Helix” on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama, filled with colorful characters, about ambition and competition in the pursuit of nature’s wonders. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would.
She would help to make what the book’s author, James Watson, later told her was the most important biological advance since he and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA. She worked with a brilliant Parisian biologist named Emmanuelle Charpentier to turn a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as Crispr, it ushered in a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.
For this accomplishment, on Wednesday they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It is a recognition that the development of Crispr will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, the computer and the internet. Now we are entering a life-science era. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study the code of life. It will be a revolution that will someday allow us to cure diseases, fend off virus pandemics and (if we decide it’s wise) to design babies with the genetic features we want for them.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/opin ... 778d3e6de3
With Crispr, two scientists turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race.
When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled “The Double Helix” on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama, filled with colorful characters, about ambition and competition in the pursuit of nature’s wonders. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would.
She would help to make what the book’s author, James Watson, later told her was the most important biological advance since he and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA. She worked with a brilliant Parisian biologist named Emmanuelle Charpentier to turn a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as Crispr, it ushered in a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.
For this accomplishment, on Wednesday they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It is a recognition that the development of Crispr will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, the computer and the internet. Now we are entering a life-science era. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study the code of life. It will be a revolution that will someday allow us to cure diseases, fend off virus pandemics and (if we decide it’s wise) to design babies with the genetic features we want for them.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/opin ... 778d3e6de3
2020 Nobel Prize Winners: Full List
Nobel Prize season begins every October as committees in Sweden and Norway name laureates in a variety of prizes in the sciences, literature and economics, as well as peace work. The announcements started on Monday this year with the awarding of the prize in Physiology or Medicine. They will continue until next Monday, when the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is announced.
The Nobel Prizes most years are presented to recipients in Stockholm and Oslo in December. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the committees are changing their approaches. Some of the events in Stockholm will be canceled in favor of a digital ceremony for the Nobelists, and medals and diplomas are to be distributed to the recipients’ embassies and handed over in their home countries. Recipients may be invited to the award ceremony for 2021, if possible.
The Oslo ceremony for the peace prize will be smaller than in most years, with a limited audience.
The Nobel committee also announced another change last month: Each prize will rise to 10 million Swedish krona, 1 million more than in the previous year. That’s a hike in the prize value of about $112,000 in current exchange rates.
https://www.nytimes.com/article/2020-no ... 778d3e6de3
******
Nobel Prize in Medicine Awarded to Scientists Who Discovered Hepatitis C Virus
Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice were jointly honored for their decisive contribution to the fight against blood-borne hepatitis, a major global health problem.
Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles Rice shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Dr. Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice on Monday for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus, a breakthrough the Nobel committee said had “made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of lives.”
“For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating hepatitis C virus from the world population,” the committee said in a statement. They announced the prize at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
About 71 million people worldwide live with a chronic infection of the hepatitis C virus, a blood-borne pathogen that can cause severe liver inflammation, or hepatitis, and is typically transmitted through shared or reused needles and syringes, infected blood transfusions and sexual practices that lead to blood exposure.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/heal ... 778d3e6de3
*****
World Food Program Awarded Nobel Peace Prize for Work During Pandemic
The Nobel committee said the U.N. agency’s work to address hunger had laid the foundations for peace in nations ravaged by war.
The World Food Program was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for its efforts to combat a surge in global hunger amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has swept around the world with devastating impact.
The Nobel committee said that work by the organization, a United Nations agency, to address hunger had laid the foundations for peace in nations ravaged by war.
“In the face of the pandemic, the World Food Program has demonstrated an impressive ability to intensify its efforts,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said as she announced the prize in Oslo. “The combination of violent conflict and the pandemic has led to a dramatic rise in the number of people living on the brink of starvation,” she added.
In many nations, particularly those at war, the combination of conflict and the pandemic has sharply increased the number of people on the brink of starvation. As the global fallout from the pandemic began this spring, the World Food Program estimated that the number of people experiencing life-threatening levels of food insecurity could more than double this year, to 265 million.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/worl ... pe=Article
Nobel Prize season begins every October as committees in Sweden and Norway name laureates in a variety of prizes in the sciences, literature and economics, as well as peace work. The announcements started on Monday this year with the awarding of the prize in Physiology or Medicine. They will continue until next Monday, when the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is announced.
The Nobel Prizes most years are presented to recipients in Stockholm and Oslo in December. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the committees are changing their approaches. Some of the events in Stockholm will be canceled in favor of a digital ceremony for the Nobelists, and medals and diplomas are to be distributed to the recipients’ embassies and handed over in their home countries. Recipients may be invited to the award ceremony for 2021, if possible.
The Oslo ceremony for the peace prize will be smaller than in most years, with a limited audience.
The Nobel committee also announced another change last month: Each prize will rise to 10 million Swedish krona, 1 million more than in the previous year. That’s a hike in the prize value of about $112,000 in current exchange rates.
https://www.nytimes.com/article/2020-no ... 778d3e6de3
******
Nobel Prize in Medicine Awarded to Scientists Who Discovered Hepatitis C Virus
Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice were jointly honored for their decisive contribution to the fight against blood-borne hepatitis, a major global health problem.
Harvey Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles Rice shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Dr. Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice on Monday for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus, a breakthrough the Nobel committee said had “made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of lives.”
“For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating hepatitis C virus from the world population,” the committee said in a statement. They announced the prize at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
About 71 million people worldwide live with a chronic infection of the hepatitis C virus, a blood-borne pathogen that can cause severe liver inflammation, or hepatitis, and is typically transmitted through shared or reused needles and syringes, infected blood transfusions and sexual practices that lead to blood exposure.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/heal ... 778d3e6de3
*****
World Food Program Awarded Nobel Peace Prize for Work During Pandemic
The Nobel committee said the U.N. agency’s work to address hunger had laid the foundations for peace in nations ravaged by war.
The World Food Program was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for its efforts to combat a surge in global hunger amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has swept around the world with devastating impact.
The Nobel committee said that work by the organization, a United Nations agency, to address hunger had laid the foundations for peace in nations ravaged by war.
“In the face of the pandemic, the World Food Program has demonstrated an impressive ability to intensify its efforts,” Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said as she announced the prize in Oslo. “The combination of violent conflict and the pandemic has led to a dramatic rise in the number of people living on the brink of starvation,” she added.
In many nations, particularly those at war, the combination of conflict and the pandemic has sharply increased the number of people on the brink of starvation. As the global fallout from the pandemic began this spring, the World Food Program estimated that the number of people experiencing life-threatening levels of food insecurity could more than double this year, to 265 million.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/worl ... pe=Article
U.S. Auction Theorists Win the 2020 Nobel in Economics
Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson were honored for work that has pushed auctions into new and useful territory.
Two American economists, Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson, were awarded the Nobel in economic science on Monday for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats — innovations that have had huge practical applications when it comes to allocating scarce resources.
The pair, close collaborators who are both affiliated with Stanford University, pioneered a type of auction that governments have since used to bid radio frequency.
“They haven’t just profoundly changed the way we understand auctions — they have changed how things are auctioned,” said Alvin E. Roth, a Nobel laureate himself who was one of Mr. Wilson’s doctoral students. “The two of them are some of the greatest theorists living in economics today.”
Auctions help to sell a variety of products, including diamonds, minerals and online advertising. They can also take on various characteristics: Objects can have a shared, common value for all bidders (such as commodities like oil) or private values that vary across bidders (like art). Bidders may know exactly what the object’s value is, or they may have imperfect information. Bids can be open, meaning everyone can see them, or closed.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/busi ... 778d3e6de3
Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson were honored for work that has pushed auctions into new and useful territory.
Two American economists, Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson, were awarded the Nobel in economic science on Monday for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats — innovations that have had huge practical applications when it comes to allocating scarce resources.
The pair, close collaborators who are both affiliated with Stanford University, pioneered a type of auction that governments have since used to bid radio frequency.
“They haven’t just profoundly changed the way we understand auctions — they have changed how things are auctioned,” said Alvin E. Roth, a Nobel laureate himself who was one of Mr. Wilson’s doctoral students. “The two of them are some of the greatest theorists living in economics today.”
Auctions help to sell a variety of products, including diamonds, minerals and online advertising. They can also take on various characteristics: Objects can have a shared, common value for all bidders (such as commodities like oil) or private values that vary across bidders (like art). Bidders may know exactly what the object’s value is, or they may have imperfect information. Bids can be open, meaning everyone can see them, or closed.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/12/busi ... 778d3e6de3
2 Win Abel Prize for Work That Bridged Math and Computer Science
Avi Wigderson and László Lovász will share the annual prize that aims to be something like the Nobel for mathematics.
Two mathematicians will share this year’s Abel Prize — regarded as the field’s equivalent of the Nobel — for advances in understanding the foundations of what can and cannot be solved with computers.
The work of the winners — László Lovász, 73, of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and Avi Wigderson, 64, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. — involves proving theorems and developing methods in pure mathematics, but the research has found practical use in computer science, particularly in cryptography.
On Wednesday, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, which administers the prize, cited Dr. Lovász and Dr. Wigderson “for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics.”
Dr. Lovász and Dr. Wigderson will split the award money of 7.5 million Norwegian kroner, or about $880,000.
The two mathematicians have “really opened up the landscape and shown the fruitful interactions between computer science and mathematics,” said Hans Z. Munthe-Kaas, a mathematician at the University of Bergen in Norway who was the chairman of the Abel Prize committee.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/scie ... iversified
Avi Wigderson and László Lovász will share the annual prize that aims to be something like the Nobel for mathematics.
Two mathematicians will share this year’s Abel Prize — regarded as the field’s equivalent of the Nobel — for advances in understanding the foundations of what can and cannot be solved with computers.
The work of the winners — László Lovász, 73, of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and Avi Wigderson, 64, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. — involves proving theorems and developing methods in pure mathematics, but the research has found practical use in computer science, particularly in cryptography.
On Wednesday, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, which administers the prize, cited Dr. Lovász and Dr. Wigderson “for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics.”
Dr. Lovász and Dr. Wigderson will split the award money of 7.5 million Norwegian kroner, or about $880,000.
The two mathematicians have “really opened up the landscape and shown the fruitful interactions between computer science and mathematics,” said Hans Z. Munthe-Kaas, a mathematician at the University of Bergen in Norway who was the chairman of the Abel Prize committee.
More..
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/scie ... iversified
Re: Nobel Prizes
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Is Awarded for Work on Immune Systems
Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi were awarded the prize for research showing how the body regulates its immune responses.
The winners were announced at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, on Monday. Credit...Claudio Bresciani/TT News Agency, via Associated Press
Ali Watkins
By Gina Kolata and Ali Watkins
Oct. 6, 2025
Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their discoveries of peripheral immune tolerance — the system that explains how the immune system prevents rogue cells from attacking tissues and organs.
Their research, the prize committee said, has contributed to medical advances in cancer and autoimmune treatments, and may help with organ transplants.
The three researchers will split a prize of 11 million Swedish kroner, or around $1.17 million.
Why did they receive the prize?
Central to the scientists’ research were their discoveries about T cells, the white blood cells that fight infection in the body. They identified a class of cells, regulatory T cells, and the genes that control them.
In doing so, they answered puzzling biological questions: How does the immune system know to avoid attacking the body’s own healthy cells? And if by mistake some immune system cells fail to get the message, how are those cells stopped from wreaking havoc?
The committee called their work “fundamental” to understanding how the body’s immune system functions.
In an interview after the prize announcement, Rickard Sandberg, a professor in the department of cell and molecular biology at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and a member of the prize committee, said that the research had provided a “new handle” on how to approach autoimmune disorders, or treatments and organ transplants.
There are more than 200 clinical trials underway that build on their research, he said.
How did they make their discovery?
Dr. Sakaguchi, now a distinguished professor at the University of Osaka in Japan, worked out a medical mystery involving the thymus, a small organ behind the breastbone. It sorts out immune cells that might attack the body’s own tissues and organs and prevents them from getting into the bloodstream.
He first studied the organ as a student in the 1970s, then performed research in the United States in the 1980s. His colleagues had done an experiment that made no sense. In the first few days after a mouse is born, the thymus is supposed to train the immune system, preventing T cells that could attack the body from ever entering the bloodstream.
In this experiment, researchers, removed the thymus from mice three days after the animals were born.
In theory, the organ should have done its job during those three days. Harmful T cells should never have had a chance to get to the body’s tissues and organs. Instead, the opposite happened — the immune system went wild, attacking organs.
But why?
After more than a decade of work, Dr. Sakaguchi discovered that the thymus did not stop every harmful cell from escaping into the circulation. So even though most of those cells were blocked in the mice, enough got out to go on attack against the body’s own tissues.
But, he learned, the thymus would have fixed that problem if it had not been removed so soon. The immune system, he discovered, has a backup system, a set of immune cells that stop mistaken attacks. It involved a new class of T cells, which he called regulatory T cells. Those mice whose thymuses were removed after three days had not had a chance to develop the regulatory T cells.
But what genes control this system?
The answer came from Dr. Brunkow and Dr. Ramsdell, working at what was then a British-owned biotechnology company outside Seattle, Celltech Chiroscience. They decided to study a strain of mice that developed a horrible autoimmune disease. Their immune systems’ attack on their own cells was so severe that the mice lived for only a few weeks.
The mice were missing a set of genetic instructions. In a healthy individual, these tell the immune system T cells to hold off their attack when they enter the general circulatory system.
After years of arduous work, the two researchers found the gene, called FOXP3. It resembled others that control other genes. And, in 2001, they reported that a rare autoimmune disease in humans called IPEX was the same as the disease in mice.
Without FOXP3, regulatory T cells do not form. The body does not make T cells that tell other T cells that can attack the body’s cells not to respond.
“This is a great recognition of the fundamental importance of distinguishing self from non-self,” said John Wherry, director of the Colton Center for Autoimmunity at the University of Pennsylvania.
Cancers block attacks from the immune system by attracting a thicket of regulatory T cells. With the FOXP3 gene identified, and its role understood, researchers can develop drugs to turn the immune system against these cancer cells.
With autoimmune diseases, there is the opposite problem. Regulatory T cells are missing or defective. Using FOXP3 as a starting point, researchers are developing drugs to teach the immune system to stop its attack.
“Major sets of drugs are going into the clinic,” for preliminary testing in cancer and autoimmunity, Dr. Wherry said.
Who are the laureates?
Dr. Sakaguchi is an expert in immunology at the University of Osaka.
He was born in the city of Nagahama, about 60 miles northeast of Kyoto. As a child, he was interested in art and philosophy, but his father, a high school teacher, encouraged him to pursue science. He enrolled at Kyoto University, where he became interested in immunology. In the 1980s, he worked as a researcher at Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University, among other institutions, before returning to Japan.
Dr. Brunkow researches genomics and autoimmune diseases at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Dr. Ramsdell is a scientific adviser at Sonoma Biotherapeutics, a company based in San Francisco.
What did the laureates say about winning the prize?
Dr. Sakaguchi called the award “a surprise and an honor” at a news conference on Monday on the campus of the University of Osaka.
He said that when he began his work, it was difficult to obtain funding. Shigeru Ishiba, Japan’s prime minister, called into the news conference and asked Dr. Sakaguchi why he had persisted in his research despite initial doubts about his theories.
“I think my stubbornness led to these results,” Dr. Sakaguchi replied.
Who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2024?
Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were recognized for the discovery of microRNA, a tiny class of RNA molecules that play a crucial role in determining how organisms mature and function — and how they sometimes malfunction.
When will the other Nobel Prizes be announced?
The prize for physiology or medicine is the first of six Nobel Prizes that will be awarded this year. Each award recognizes groundbreaking contributions by an individual or organization in a specific field.
The Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded on Tuesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton shared the prize for work on discoveries that helped computers learn more in the way the human brain does, providing the building blocks for developments in artificial intelligence.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded on Wednesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, the prize went to Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and David Baker for work that showed the potential of artificial intelligence and other technology to predict the shape of proteins and to invent new ones.
The Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded on Thursday by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Last year, Han Kang, known best for her novel “The Vegetarian,” became the first writer from South Korea to receive the award.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo. Last year, the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, a grass-roots movement of atomic bomb survivors, received the award “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.”
Next week, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be awarded on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson were honored for research into how institutions shape which countries become wealthy and prosperous — and how those structures came to exist in the first place.
All of the prize announcements are streamed live by the Nobel Prize organization.
Javier C. Hernández, Kiuko Notoya and Hisako Ueno contributed reporting.
The Nobel Prizes
Beyond the Nobel Prizes Is a World of Scientific Awards https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/05/scie ... obels.html
Oct. 5, 2025
A Nobel Prize Might Lower a Scientist’s Impact https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/01/scie ... mpact.html
Oct. 1, 2023
Gina Kolata reports on diseases and treatments, how treatments are discovered and tested, and how they affect people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/heal ... e9677ea768
Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi were awarded the prize for research showing how the body regulates its immune responses.
The winners were announced at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, on Monday. Credit...Claudio Bresciani/TT News Agency, via Associated Press
Ali Watkins
By Gina Kolata and Ali Watkins
Oct. 6, 2025
Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their discoveries of peripheral immune tolerance — the system that explains how the immune system prevents rogue cells from attacking tissues and organs.
Their research, the prize committee said, has contributed to medical advances in cancer and autoimmune treatments, and may help with organ transplants.
The three researchers will split a prize of 11 million Swedish kroner, or around $1.17 million.
Why did they receive the prize?
Central to the scientists’ research were their discoveries about T cells, the white blood cells that fight infection in the body. They identified a class of cells, regulatory T cells, and the genes that control them.
In doing so, they answered puzzling biological questions: How does the immune system know to avoid attacking the body’s own healthy cells? And if by mistake some immune system cells fail to get the message, how are those cells stopped from wreaking havoc?
The committee called their work “fundamental” to understanding how the body’s immune system functions.
In an interview after the prize announcement, Rickard Sandberg, a professor in the department of cell and molecular biology at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and a member of the prize committee, said that the research had provided a “new handle” on how to approach autoimmune disorders, or treatments and organ transplants.
There are more than 200 clinical trials underway that build on their research, he said.
How did they make their discovery?
Dr. Sakaguchi, now a distinguished professor at the University of Osaka in Japan, worked out a medical mystery involving the thymus, a small organ behind the breastbone. It sorts out immune cells that might attack the body’s own tissues and organs and prevents them from getting into the bloodstream.
He first studied the organ as a student in the 1970s, then performed research in the United States in the 1980s. His colleagues had done an experiment that made no sense. In the first few days after a mouse is born, the thymus is supposed to train the immune system, preventing T cells that could attack the body from ever entering the bloodstream.
In this experiment, researchers, removed the thymus from mice three days after the animals were born.
In theory, the organ should have done its job during those three days. Harmful T cells should never have had a chance to get to the body’s tissues and organs. Instead, the opposite happened — the immune system went wild, attacking organs.
But why?
After more than a decade of work, Dr. Sakaguchi discovered that the thymus did not stop every harmful cell from escaping into the circulation. So even though most of those cells were blocked in the mice, enough got out to go on attack against the body’s own tissues.
But, he learned, the thymus would have fixed that problem if it had not been removed so soon. The immune system, he discovered, has a backup system, a set of immune cells that stop mistaken attacks. It involved a new class of T cells, which he called regulatory T cells. Those mice whose thymuses were removed after three days had not had a chance to develop the regulatory T cells.
But what genes control this system?
The answer came from Dr. Brunkow and Dr. Ramsdell, working at what was then a British-owned biotechnology company outside Seattle, Celltech Chiroscience. They decided to study a strain of mice that developed a horrible autoimmune disease. Their immune systems’ attack on their own cells was so severe that the mice lived for only a few weeks.
The mice were missing a set of genetic instructions. In a healthy individual, these tell the immune system T cells to hold off their attack when they enter the general circulatory system.
After years of arduous work, the two researchers found the gene, called FOXP3. It resembled others that control other genes. And, in 2001, they reported that a rare autoimmune disease in humans called IPEX was the same as the disease in mice.
Without FOXP3, regulatory T cells do not form. The body does not make T cells that tell other T cells that can attack the body’s cells not to respond.
“This is a great recognition of the fundamental importance of distinguishing self from non-self,” said John Wherry, director of the Colton Center for Autoimmunity at the University of Pennsylvania.
Cancers block attacks from the immune system by attracting a thicket of regulatory T cells. With the FOXP3 gene identified, and its role understood, researchers can develop drugs to turn the immune system against these cancer cells.
With autoimmune diseases, there is the opposite problem. Regulatory T cells are missing or defective. Using FOXP3 as a starting point, researchers are developing drugs to teach the immune system to stop its attack.
“Major sets of drugs are going into the clinic,” for preliminary testing in cancer and autoimmunity, Dr. Wherry said.
Who are the laureates?
Dr. Sakaguchi is an expert in immunology at the University of Osaka.
He was born in the city of Nagahama, about 60 miles northeast of Kyoto. As a child, he was interested in art and philosophy, but his father, a high school teacher, encouraged him to pursue science. He enrolled at Kyoto University, where he became interested in immunology. In the 1980s, he worked as a researcher at Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University, among other institutions, before returning to Japan.
Dr. Brunkow researches genomics and autoimmune diseases at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Dr. Ramsdell is a scientific adviser at Sonoma Biotherapeutics, a company based in San Francisco.
What did the laureates say about winning the prize?
Dr. Sakaguchi called the award “a surprise and an honor” at a news conference on Monday on the campus of the University of Osaka.
He said that when he began his work, it was difficult to obtain funding. Shigeru Ishiba, Japan’s prime minister, called into the news conference and asked Dr. Sakaguchi why he had persisted in his research despite initial doubts about his theories.
“I think my stubbornness led to these results,” Dr. Sakaguchi replied.
Who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2024?
Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun were recognized for the discovery of microRNA, a tiny class of RNA molecules that play a crucial role in determining how organisms mature and function — and how they sometimes malfunction.
When will the other Nobel Prizes be announced?
The prize for physiology or medicine is the first of six Nobel Prizes that will be awarded this year. Each award recognizes groundbreaking contributions by an individual or organization in a specific field.
The Nobel Prize in Physics will be awarded on Tuesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton shared the prize for work on discoveries that helped computers learn more in the way the human brain does, providing the building blocks for developments in artificial intelligence.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded on Wednesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, the prize went to Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and David Baker for work that showed the potential of artificial intelligence and other technology to predict the shape of proteins and to invent new ones.
The Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded on Thursday by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Last year, Han Kang, known best for her novel “The Vegetarian,” became the first writer from South Korea to receive the award.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo. Last year, the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, a grass-roots movement of atomic bomb survivors, received the award “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.”
Next week, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be awarded on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson were honored for research into how institutions shape which countries become wealthy and prosperous — and how those structures came to exist in the first place.
All of the prize announcements are streamed live by the Nobel Prize organization.
Javier C. Hernández, Kiuko Notoya and Hisako Ueno contributed reporting.
The Nobel Prizes
Beyond the Nobel Prizes Is a World of Scientific Awards https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/05/scie ... obels.html
Oct. 5, 2025
A Nobel Prize Might Lower a Scientist’s Impact https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/01/scie ... mpact.html
Oct. 1, 2023
Gina Kolata reports on diseases and treatments, how treatments are discovered and tested, and how they affect people.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/heal ... e9677ea768
Re: Nobel Prizes
Nobel Prize in Physics Is Awarded for Work in Quantum Mechanics
John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis were recognized for work that made behaviors of the subatomic realm observable at a larger scale.
The Nobel Committee for Physics announced the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday.Credit...Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday in Sweden for showing that two properties of quantum mechanics, the physical laws that rule the subatomic realm, could be observed in a system large enough to see with the naked eye.
“There is no advanced technology today that does not rely on quantum mechanics,” Olle Eriksson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said during the announcement of the award. The laureates’ discoveries, he added, paved the way for technologies like the cellphone, cameras and fiber optic cables.
It also helped lay the groundwork for current attempts to build a quantum computer, a device that could compute and process information at speeds that would not be possible with classical computers.
“This prize really demonstrates what the American system of science has done best,” said Jonathan Bagger, the chief executive officer of the American Physical Society. “It really showed the importance of the investment in research for which we do not yet have an application, because we know that sooner or later, there will be an application.”
The three laureates will share a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor, or around $1.17 million.
Why did they receive the prize?
The three scientists were recognized for a series of experiments conducted in 1984 and 1985. They proved the existence of two quantum phenomena on a system visible to the human eye.
The principles of quantum mechanics describe the strange properties and behaviors of single or small collections of elementary particles. In one such behavior, a particle can move through a barrier even if it does not have enough energy to do so. This is called quantum tunneling, and it had been confirmed only at a very small scale.
Steven Girvin, a theoretical physicist at Yale University, likened the phenomenon of quantum tunneling to the attempt of driving a car in neutral over a hill. If the hill is too high, the car won’t have enough energy to make it to the top. Instead it comes to a stop and falls back down.
The hill, he said, is like an energy barrier that the car cannot get over.
“But if you were in a very tiny car and subject to the laws of quantum mechanics, even though you didn’t have enough energy to go over the hill,” he said, “you could still get to the other side by a process called tunneling.”
Another property of subatomic particles is that they can gain or lose energy only in fixed, discrete amounts. This is known as the quantization of energy.
With a large number of particles, however, these tiny quantum effects generally become insignificant. (It is why humans, made of gazillions of atoms, cannot tunnel through walls.)“We always thought of quantum mechanics as a picture which applies at the level of single electrons and atoms,” said Anthony Leggett, a physicist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In the 1970s he and a graduate student predicted that quantum tunneling could be observed in a larger system. The laureates of this year’s physics prize confirmed that prediction.
They showed, for the first time, that quantum tunneling is observable in a system they called macroscopic because it was “big enough to get one’s grubby fingers on,” according to their paper describing the discovery. They also showed that the energy of this system was quantized, or existed at fixed levels.
“I’m very pleased,” said Dr. Leggett, who won a part of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003. “I had hoped they might get a Nobel or something substantial for that work.”
The laureates made their discoveries by studying a chip with a circuit that was superconducting, meaning it was capable of conducting current with no electrical resistance. As a result, the current was “trapped” in a state of flow without any voltage, because it did not have enough energy to escape, according to a summary posted by the Nobel committee, as if behind a barrier that it is unable to cross.
The researchers observed the current go from a state of zero voltage to one of nonzero voltage, an observation of quantum tunneling. They also observed that the system only absorbed light of certain frequencies, suggesting that its energy was quantized.
Who are the laureates?
All three are professors at American universities. John Clarke, who studied at Cambridge University, has been a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1969. He is now a professor emeritus at the university’s graduate school.
Dr. Girvin at Yale referred to Dr. Clarke as “a godfather of superconducting electronics.”
Michel H. Devoret, who was born in Paris and received his Ph.D. there, is a professor emeritus in applied physics at the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science.
John M. Martinis holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. After teaching at the university, he most recently worked with Google’s quantum A.I. team. He is also a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
At the time of the experiments, Dr. Clarke was the supervisor of Dr. Devoret, then a postdoctoral researcher, and Dr. Martinis, then a graduate student.
Dr. Clarke spoke to the Nobel committee by phone during the award announcement.
“To put it mildly, it was the surprise of my life,” he said about the recognition. “I’m completely stunned.” He added that it had never occurred to him that their discoveries “might be the basis of a Nobel Prize.”
“I could not imagine accepting the prize without the two of them,” Dr. Clarke said in an interview after the announcement.
What are the prospects for quantum computing?
A race is on across industry and academia to fulfill the promise of quantum computing, a strange and powerful technology.
A true quantum computer could accelerate the progress of drug discovery or other scientific research. It could also break the encryption that protects computers vital to national security.
With so much interest in applications of quantum mechanics, the work of Dr. Devoret and Dr. Martinis has moved beyond academia.
In 2014, Google hired Dr. Martinis and many of the researchers who worked alongside him at the University of California, Santa Barbara. At Google, he and his team built a machine that achieved what was called “quantum supremacy,” which was seen as a key milestone in the decades-long effort to build a viable quantum computer.
Dr. Martinis left Google in 2020 and in 2022 became a co-founder of Qolab, a quantum computing start-up.
Dr. Devoret is now the chief scientist in Google’s quantum computing division, as the tech giant competes with other labs to advance the technology.
Late last year, Google announced that it had built a quantum computer that needed less than five minutes to perform a particularly complex mathematical calculation in a test designed solely to gauge the progress of the technology. One of the world’s most powerful non-quantum supercomputers would not be able to complete it in 10 septillion years, a length of time that far exceeds the age of the known universe.
The technology remains experimental. But with tech giants like Google, Amazon and Microsoft and myriad start-ups like Qolab pushing the technology forward, many experts believe the technology will eventually fulfill its considerable promise, though this could still be decades away.
Who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024?
John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton shared the prize for work on discoveries that helped computers learn more in the way the human brain does, providing the building blocks for developments in artificial intelligence.
Who else has won a Nobel Prize this year?
Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their discoveries of peripheral immune tolerance — the system that explains how the immune system prevents rogue cells from attacking tissues and organs.
When will the other Nobel Prizes be announced?
The prize for physics is the second of six Nobel Prizes that will be awarded this year. Each award recognizes groundbreaking contributions by an individual or organization in a specific field.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded on Wednesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, the prize went to Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and David Baker for work that showed the potential of artificial intelligence and other technology to predict the shape of proteins and to invent new ones.
The Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded on Thursday by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Last year, Han Kang, known best for her novel “The Vegetarian,” became the first writer from South Korea to receive the award.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo. Last year, the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, a grass-roots movement of atomic bomb survivors, received the award “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.”
Next week, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be awarded on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson were honored for research into how institutions shape which countries become wealthy and prosperous — and how those structures came to exist in the first place.
All of the prize announcements are streamed live by the Nobel Prize organization.
Cade Metz contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/scie ... e9677ea768
John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis were recognized for work that made behaviors of the subatomic realm observable at a larger scale.
The Nobel Committee for Physics announced the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday.Credit...Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday in Sweden for showing that two properties of quantum mechanics, the physical laws that rule the subatomic realm, could be observed in a system large enough to see with the naked eye.
“There is no advanced technology today that does not rely on quantum mechanics,” Olle Eriksson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said during the announcement of the award. The laureates’ discoveries, he added, paved the way for technologies like the cellphone, cameras and fiber optic cables.
It also helped lay the groundwork for current attempts to build a quantum computer, a device that could compute and process information at speeds that would not be possible with classical computers.
“This prize really demonstrates what the American system of science has done best,” said Jonathan Bagger, the chief executive officer of the American Physical Society. “It really showed the importance of the investment in research for which we do not yet have an application, because we know that sooner or later, there will be an application.”
The three laureates will share a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor, or around $1.17 million.
Why did they receive the prize?
The three scientists were recognized for a series of experiments conducted in 1984 and 1985. They proved the existence of two quantum phenomena on a system visible to the human eye.
The principles of quantum mechanics describe the strange properties and behaviors of single or small collections of elementary particles. In one such behavior, a particle can move through a barrier even if it does not have enough energy to do so. This is called quantum tunneling, and it had been confirmed only at a very small scale.
Steven Girvin, a theoretical physicist at Yale University, likened the phenomenon of quantum tunneling to the attempt of driving a car in neutral over a hill. If the hill is too high, the car won’t have enough energy to make it to the top. Instead it comes to a stop and falls back down.
The hill, he said, is like an energy barrier that the car cannot get over.
“But if you were in a very tiny car and subject to the laws of quantum mechanics, even though you didn’t have enough energy to go over the hill,” he said, “you could still get to the other side by a process called tunneling.”
Another property of subatomic particles is that they can gain or lose energy only in fixed, discrete amounts. This is known as the quantization of energy.
With a large number of particles, however, these tiny quantum effects generally become insignificant. (It is why humans, made of gazillions of atoms, cannot tunnel through walls.)“We always thought of quantum mechanics as a picture which applies at the level of single electrons and atoms,” said Anthony Leggett, a physicist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In the 1970s he and a graduate student predicted that quantum tunneling could be observed in a larger system. The laureates of this year’s physics prize confirmed that prediction.
They showed, for the first time, that quantum tunneling is observable in a system they called macroscopic because it was “big enough to get one’s grubby fingers on,” according to their paper describing the discovery. They also showed that the energy of this system was quantized, or existed at fixed levels.
“I’m very pleased,” said Dr. Leggett, who won a part of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003. “I had hoped they might get a Nobel or something substantial for that work.”
The laureates made their discoveries by studying a chip with a circuit that was superconducting, meaning it was capable of conducting current with no electrical resistance. As a result, the current was “trapped” in a state of flow without any voltage, because it did not have enough energy to escape, according to a summary posted by the Nobel committee, as if behind a barrier that it is unable to cross.
The researchers observed the current go from a state of zero voltage to one of nonzero voltage, an observation of quantum tunneling. They also observed that the system only absorbed light of certain frequencies, suggesting that its energy was quantized.
Who are the laureates?
All three are professors at American universities. John Clarke, who studied at Cambridge University, has been a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1969. He is now a professor emeritus at the university’s graduate school.
Dr. Girvin at Yale referred to Dr. Clarke as “a godfather of superconducting electronics.”
Michel H. Devoret, who was born in Paris and received his Ph.D. there, is a professor emeritus in applied physics at the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science.
John M. Martinis holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. After teaching at the university, he most recently worked with Google’s quantum A.I. team. He is also a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
At the time of the experiments, Dr. Clarke was the supervisor of Dr. Devoret, then a postdoctoral researcher, and Dr. Martinis, then a graduate student.
Dr. Clarke spoke to the Nobel committee by phone during the award announcement.
“To put it mildly, it was the surprise of my life,” he said about the recognition. “I’m completely stunned.” He added that it had never occurred to him that their discoveries “might be the basis of a Nobel Prize.”
“I could not imagine accepting the prize without the two of them,” Dr. Clarke said in an interview after the announcement.
What are the prospects for quantum computing?
A race is on across industry and academia to fulfill the promise of quantum computing, a strange and powerful technology.
A true quantum computer could accelerate the progress of drug discovery or other scientific research. It could also break the encryption that protects computers vital to national security.
With so much interest in applications of quantum mechanics, the work of Dr. Devoret and Dr. Martinis has moved beyond academia.
In 2014, Google hired Dr. Martinis and many of the researchers who worked alongside him at the University of California, Santa Barbara. At Google, he and his team built a machine that achieved what was called “quantum supremacy,” which was seen as a key milestone in the decades-long effort to build a viable quantum computer.
Dr. Martinis left Google in 2020 and in 2022 became a co-founder of Qolab, a quantum computing start-up.
Dr. Devoret is now the chief scientist in Google’s quantum computing division, as the tech giant competes with other labs to advance the technology.
Late last year, Google announced that it had built a quantum computer that needed less than five minutes to perform a particularly complex mathematical calculation in a test designed solely to gauge the progress of the technology. One of the world’s most powerful non-quantum supercomputers would not be able to complete it in 10 septillion years, a length of time that far exceeds the age of the known universe.
The technology remains experimental. But with tech giants like Google, Amazon and Microsoft and myriad start-ups like Qolab pushing the technology forward, many experts believe the technology will eventually fulfill its considerable promise, though this could still be decades away.
Who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024?
John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton shared the prize for work on discoveries that helped computers learn more in the way the human brain does, providing the building blocks for developments in artificial intelligence.
Who else has won a Nobel Prize this year?
Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their discoveries of peripheral immune tolerance — the system that explains how the immune system prevents rogue cells from attacking tissues and organs.
When will the other Nobel Prizes be announced?
The prize for physics is the second of six Nobel Prizes that will be awarded this year. Each award recognizes groundbreaking contributions by an individual or organization in a specific field.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded on Wednesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, the prize went to Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and David Baker for work that showed the potential of artificial intelligence and other technology to predict the shape of proteins and to invent new ones.
The Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded on Thursday by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Last year, Han Kang, known best for her novel “The Vegetarian,” became the first writer from South Korea to receive the award.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo. Last year, the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, a grass-roots movement of atomic bomb survivors, received the award “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.”
Next week, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be awarded on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson were honored for research into how institutions shape which countries become wealthy and prosperous — and how those structures came to exist in the first place.
All of the prize announcements are streamed live by the Nobel Prize organization.
Cade Metz contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/scie ... e9677ea768
Re: Nobel Prizes
Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to Architects of Metal-Organic Frameworks
The prize was awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi for the development of an architecture that some chemists compare with a molecular sponge.
The Nobel Committee for Chemistry announced that Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi had won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday.Credit...Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Alexa Robles-Gil and Ali Watkins
Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for the development of molecular building blocks with spaces large enough that gases and other chemicals can flow through them.
The cavities on the inside are “almost like rooms in a hotel, so that guest molecules can enter and also exit again from the same material,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said during the announcement of the award. The laureates’ discoveries, he added, paved the way for the creation of materials that can separate toxic chemicals from wastewater or harvest water molecules in a desert.
The laureates’ work started with experiments by Dr. Robson in the 1980s and gradually developed over a period of about 15 years.
“It takes time for science to be recognized, and it takes multiple workers in the field with different approaches,” said Dorothy Phillips, president of the American Chemical Society.
The three laureates will share a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor, or around $1.17 million.
Why did the Nobel Committee say they received the prize?
The scientists are responsible for developing a new kind of molecular structure that combined metals and organic molecules. The metals act as nodes and are linked up by organic molecules containing carbon. Large, empty spaces form inside these structures through which gases and other materials can flow.
Dr. Robson first experimented with metal-organic frameworks in 1989, when he combined copper ions with four-armed molecules, the committee said. The result was a sort of crystal with large cavities, indicating that other molecules might be able to move in and out of the framework easily.
But the structure was unstable and collapsed quickly. That initial experiment was built on by Dr. Kitagawa and Dr. Yaghi, whose work from 1992 to 2003 helped stabilize the framework that Dr. Robson had created, the committee said.
Dr. Linke likened the structure to the handbag used by the character Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series. The bag looks small on the outside, but has space on the inside to fit larger stuff.
Other experts noted that metal-organic frameworks are three-dimensional, porous materials that act as a molecular sponge, able to capture other materials.
Substances based on metal-organic frameworks are “some of the highest porosity solids that exist on our planet,” said Theresa Reineke, a chemist at the University of Minnesota who worked on her Ph.D. with Dr. Yaghi.
In chemistry, molecules arrange themselves in unpredictable structures. The scientists were able to combine metals and organic molecules as “building blocks,” so that even if the size of the clusters changed, you would still get the same structure but with larger cavities inside, said Kim Jelfs, a computational chemist at Imperial College London.
That level of control within chemistry has “always been a challenge,” she said. “So that’s part of the excitement.”
The scientists’ experiments laid the foundation for the development of thousands of metal-organic structures with many real-world applications, like trapping gas emitted by fruit so it ripens more slowly.
It has “sparked a whole field,” Dr. Jelfs said. “There’s an enormous number of people that work in this area now,” she added.
One commercial application for metal-organic frameworks is a technology that contains toxic gas during the production of semiconductors, according to a summary posted by the Nobel committee. The porous structure acts like a sponge that sucks in more gas than traditional materials are capable of holding.
The scientific field around metal-organic frameworks is focused on higher complexity applications. “We’re just scratching the surface,” Amanda Morris, a chemist at Virginia Tech, said.
Dr. Yaghi is currently working on those applications. He’s the founder of Atoco, a start-up that is working on technologies that can harvest water and capture carbon. These technologies are made from materials that use metal-organic frameworks.
In capturing water, for instance, the frameworks act as a sponge with a higher surface of pores to absorb more volume per mass. In previous experiments, a metal-organic framework Dr. Yaghi’s group worked with captured water vapor at night then used the heat of the sun to convert it into water the next day.
Who are the winners?
Richard Robson is a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where he has taught since 1966. In a phone interview posted by the Nobel committee, Dr. Robson, 88, said there were “upsides and downsides” to the news of the prize.
“I’m quite old now, and handling all the nonsense that’s going to happen is going to be hard work,” he said.
Dr. Robson recalled he “always felt sort of second rate for not being a mathematician” as a younger scientist, and drifted into the field of chemistry because he “couldn’t think of anything better to do.”
Susumu Kitagawa received his Ph.D. in 1979 from Kyoto University in Japan, where he now teaches.
At a news conference hosted by Kyoto University, Dr. Kitagawa said that he learned about the prize while finishing some work in his classroom. He said he’d been getting many sales calls on his phone recently and so he “answered the phone in a bad mood.”
During the prize announcement, Dr. Kitagawa said that he was “surprised and delighted” at having been selected by the committee.
“I want to share my joy with the other two,” he said of Dr. Robson and Dr. Yaghi.
Omar M. Yaghi received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Yaghi was born to Palestinian refugees who settled in Jordan, and moved to New York for college, first at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy. He switched to the State University of New York at Albany in 1983.
In a phone interview posted by the Nobel committee, Dr. Yaghi said while waiting for an airplane to take off that he grew up in a “very humble home,” sharing a room with the cattle his family raised. His parents could barely read or write, he said.
In a news conference hosted later by Berkeley, Dr. Yaghi credited the American public university system for what he had achieved, and added that getting his first grant from the National Science Foundation ultimately led to his Nobel Prize.
Science, he reflected during the earlier phone interview, “is the greatest equalizing force in the world.”
“Smart people, talented people, skilled people, exist everywhere,” he added.
During the Berkeley news conference, he highlighted the value of scholars coming to the United States from other countries, saying that the spread of knowledge often comes from people moving across regions.
“Science allows us to talk to each other, and I don’t think you can stop that,” he said. “I think that that’s something that will continue to be important, and enlightened societies will encourage it.”
Who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024?
The prize went to Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and David Baker for work that showed the potential of artificial intelligence and other technology to predict the shape of proteins and to invent new ones.
Who else has won a Nobel Prize this year?
Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi received the physiology or medicine prize on Monday for their discoveries of peripheral immune tolerance — the system that explains how the immune system prevents rogue cells from attacking tissues and organs.
John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis were awarded the physics prize on Tuesday for showing that two properties of quantum mechanics, the physical laws that rule the subatomic realm, could be observed in a system large enough to see with the naked eye.
When will the other Nobel Prizes be announced?
The prize for chemistry was the third of six Nobel Prizes awarded this year. Each award recognizes groundbreaking contributions by an individual or organization in a specific field.
The Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded on Thursday by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Last year, Han Kang, known best for her novel “The Vegetarian,” became the first writer from South Korea to receive the award.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo. Last year, the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, a grass-roots movement of atomic bomb survivors, received the award “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.”
Next week, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be awarded on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson were honored for research into how institutions shape which countries become wealthy and prosperous — and how those structures came to exist in the first place.
All of the prize announcements are streamed live by the Nobel Prize organization.
Kiuko Notoya contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/scie ... e9677ea768
The prize was awarded to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar Yaghi for the development of an architecture that some chemists compare with a molecular sponge.
The Nobel Committee for Chemistry announced that Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi had won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday.Credit...Jonathan Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Alexa Robles-Gil and Ali Watkins
Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for the development of molecular building blocks with spaces large enough that gases and other chemicals can flow through them.
The cavities on the inside are “almost like rooms in a hotel, so that guest molecules can enter and also exit again from the same material,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said during the announcement of the award. The laureates’ discoveries, he added, paved the way for the creation of materials that can separate toxic chemicals from wastewater or harvest water molecules in a desert.
The laureates’ work started with experiments by Dr. Robson in the 1980s and gradually developed over a period of about 15 years.
“It takes time for science to be recognized, and it takes multiple workers in the field with different approaches,” said Dorothy Phillips, president of the American Chemical Society.
The three laureates will share a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor, or around $1.17 million.
Why did the Nobel Committee say they received the prize?
The scientists are responsible for developing a new kind of molecular structure that combined metals and organic molecules. The metals act as nodes and are linked up by organic molecules containing carbon. Large, empty spaces form inside these structures through which gases and other materials can flow.
Dr. Robson first experimented with metal-organic frameworks in 1989, when he combined copper ions with four-armed molecules, the committee said. The result was a sort of crystal with large cavities, indicating that other molecules might be able to move in and out of the framework easily.
But the structure was unstable and collapsed quickly. That initial experiment was built on by Dr. Kitagawa and Dr. Yaghi, whose work from 1992 to 2003 helped stabilize the framework that Dr. Robson had created, the committee said.
Dr. Linke likened the structure to the handbag used by the character Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter series. The bag looks small on the outside, but has space on the inside to fit larger stuff.
Other experts noted that metal-organic frameworks are three-dimensional, porous materials that act as a molecular sponge, able to capture other materials.
Substances based on metal-organic frameworks are “some of the highest porosity solids that exist on our planet,” said Theresa Reineke, a chemist at the University of Minnesota who worked on her Ph.D. with Dr. Yaghi.
In chemistry, molecules arrange themselves in unpredictable structures. The scientists were able to combine metals and organic molecules as “building blocks,” so that even if the size of the clusters changed, you would still get the same structure but with larger cavities inside, said Kim Jelfs, a computational chemist at Imperial College London.
That level of control within chemistry has “always been a challenge,” she said. “So that’s part of the excitement.”
The scientists’ experiments laid the foundation for the development of thousands of metal-organic structures with many real-world applications, like trapping gas emitted by fruit so it ripens more slowly.
It has “sparked a whole field,” Dr. Jelfs said. “There’s an enormous number of people that work in this area now,” she added.
One commercial application for metal-organic frameworks is a technology that contains toxic gas during the production of semiconductors, according to a summary posted by the Nobel committee. The porous structure acts like a sponge that sucks in more gas than traditional materials are capable of holding.
The scientific field around metal-organic frameworks is focused on higher complexity applications. “We’re just scratching the surface,” Amanda Morris, a chemist at Virginia Tech, said.
Dr. Yaghi is currently working on those applications. He’s the founder of Atoco, a start-up that is working on technologies that can harvest water and capture carbon. These technologies are made from materials that use metal-organic frameworks.
In capturing water, for instance, the frameworks act as a sponge with a higher surface of pores to absorb more volume per mass. In previous experiments, a metal-organic framework Dr. Yaghi’s group worked with captured water vapor at night then used the heat of the sun to convert it into water the next day.
Who are the winners?
Richard Robson is a professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where he has taught since 1966. In a phone interview posted by the Nobel committee, Dr. Robson, 88, said there were “upsides and downsides” to the news of the prize.
“I’m quite old now, and handling all the nonsense that’s going to happen is going to be hard work,” he said.
Dr. Robson recalled he “always felt sort of second rate for not being a mathematician” as a younger scientist, and drifted into the field of chemistry because he “couldn’t think of anything better to do.”
Susumu Kitagawa received his Ph.D. in 1979 from Kyoto University in Japan, where he now teaches.
At a news conference hosted by Kyoto University, Dr. Kitagawa said that he learned about the prize while finishing some work in his classroom. He said he’d been getting many sales calls on his phone recently and so he “answered the phone in a bad mood.”
During the prize announcement, Dr. Kitagawa said that he was “surprised and delighted” at having been selected by the committee.
“I want to share my joy with the other two,” he said of Dr. Robson and Dr. Yaghi.
Omar M. Yaghi received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Yaghi was born to Palestinian refugees who settled in Jordan, and moved to New York for college, first at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy. He switched to the State University of New York at Albany in 1983.
In a phone interview posted by the Nobel committee, Dr. Yaghi said while waiting for an airplane to take off that he grew up in a “very humble home,” sharing a room with the cattle his family raised. His parents could barely read or write, he said.
In a news conference hosted later by Berkeley, Dr. Yaghi credited the American public university system for what he had achieved, and added that getting his first grant from the National Science Foundation ultimately led to his Nobel Prize.
Science, he reflected during the earlier phone interview, “is the greatest equalizing force in the world.”
“Smart people, talented people, skilled people, exist everywhere,” he added.
During the Berkeley news conference, he highlighted the value of scholars coming to the United States from other countries, saying that the spread of knowledge often comes from people moving across regions.
“Science allows us to talk to each other, and I don’t think you can stop that,” he said. “I think that that’s something that will continue to be important, and enlightened societies will encourage it.”
Who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024?
The prize went to Demis Hassabis, John Jumper and David Baker for work that showed the potential of artificial intelligence and other technology to predict the shape of proteins and to invent new ones.
Who else has won a Nobel Prize this year?
Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi received the physiology or medicine prize on Monday for their discoveries of peripheral immune tolerance — the system that explains how the immune system prevents rogue cells from attacking tissues and organs.
John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis were awarded the physics prize on Tuesday for showing that two properties of quantum mechanics, the physical laws that rule the subatomic realm, could be observed in a system large enough to see with the naked eye.
When will the other Nobel Prizes be announced?
The prize for chemistry was the third of six Nobel Prizes awarded this year. Each award recognizes groundbreaking contributions by an individual or organization in a specific field.
The Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded on Thursday by the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Last year, Han Kang, known best for her novel “The Vegetarian,” became the first writer from South Korea to receive the award.
The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo. Last year, the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, a grass-roots movement of atomic bomb survivors, received the award “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.”
Next week, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be awarded on Monday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Last year, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson were honored for research into how institutions shape which countries become wealthy and prosperous — and how those structures came to exist in the first place.
All of the prize announcements are streamed live by the Nobel Prize organization.
Kiuko Notoya contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/scie ... e9677ea768