Literature laureate Jon Fosse’s magnum opus in prose is ‘Septology’ which he completed in 2021.
| Photo Credit: X/@NobelPrize

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature is being awarded to Norwegian author Jon Fosse “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”, the Royal Swedish Academy announced on October 5, 2023.

Literature laureate Fosse’s magnum opus in prose is ‘Septology’ which he completed in 2021: ‘Det andre namnet’ (2019; ‘The Other Name’, 2020), ‘Eg er ein annan’ (2020; ‘I is Another’, 2020) and ‘Eit nytt namn’ (2021; ‘A New Name’, 2021).

Fosse was born in 1959 on the Norwegian west coast. His immense œuvre is written in Norwegian Nynorsk and spans a variety of genres consisting of plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations.

Last year, the Literature Nobel was awarded to French author Annie Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.”

In 2018, the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, which names the Nobel literature committee, and sparked an exodus of members. The academy revamped itself but faced more criticism for giving the 2019 literature award to Austria’s Peter Handke, who has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes.

The Nobel Prize announcements kicked off on October 2 with the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology granted to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their “discoveries concerning nucleoside base modification that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.”

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, announced on October 4, was awarded to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.

On October 3, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics which was shared by Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier for “experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electro dynamics in matter.”

The recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on October 6 while the Prize for Economic Sciences will be released on October 9.

The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be awarded on December 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.

Paris:

Quantum dots are tiny crystals that scientists can tune to different colours, giving an extra-vivid pop to next-generation TV screens or illuminating tumours inside bodies so surgeons can hunt them down. Three scientists won the Nobel Chemistry Prize on Wednesday for their work turning an idea first theorised in the 1930s into a reality that now has pride of place in living rooms across the world.

What are quantum dots?

Quantum dots are semiconducting particles just one-thousandth the width of a human hair. In 1937, the physicist Herbert Froehlich predicted that once particles were small enough — so-called nanoparticles — they would come under the strange spell of quantum mechanics.

To explain this quantum phenomenon, American Chemical Society president Judith Giordan said to “think of it like a little box”.

When a particle is shrunk down small enough, the electron is “going to whack into the sides of the box,” she told AFP.

In a larger box, the electrons would whack the sides less often, meaning they have less energy.

For quantum dots, the larger boxes emit red light, while the smaller ones show up blue.

This means that by controlling the size of the particle, scientists can make their crystals red, blue and everything in between.

Leah Frenette, an expert on quantum dots at Imperial College London, told AFP that working with the nanomaterial was like “watching rainbows all day”. 

But it would be 40 years after Froehlich’s prediction that anyone was able to actually observe this phenomenon.

In the early 1980s, Russian-born physicist Alexei Ekimov — one of Wednesday’s new laureates — melted coloured glass and X-rayed the results. 

He noticed that the smaller particles were more blue, also recognising that this was a quantum effect.

But being glass, the material was not easy to manipulate — and being published in a Soviet scientific journal meant few noticed.

At around the same time in the United States, another new laureate Louis Brus — oblivious of Ekimov’s work — became the first to discover this colourful quantum effect in a liquid solution.

“For a long time, nobody thought you could ever actually make such small particles, yet this year’s laureates succeeded,” Nobel Committee member Johan Aqvist said.

“However, for quantum dots to become really useful, you needed to be able to make them in solution with exquisite control of their size and surface.”

The third new Nobel winner, French-born Moungi Bawendi, found a way to do just this in his lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993.

By precisely controlling the temperature of a liquid mixture of particles called colloids, Bawendi was able to grow nanocrystals to the exact size he wanted, paving the way for mass production.

What are quantum dots used in?

The most common everyday use of quantum dots is probably in “QLED” televisions.

Cyril Aymonier, head of France’s Institute of Condensed Matter Chemistry, told AFP that the nanocrystals “improve the resolution of the screen and preserve the quality of the colour for longer”.

Doctors also use their bright fluorescence to highlight organs or tumours in the bodies of patients.

Frenette said she is working on diagnostic tests which would use the dots as “little beacons” for diseases in medical samples. 

One problem is that most quantum dots are made using cadmium, a toxic heavy metal.

Both Aymonier and Frenette said they are working on quantum dots that are not toxic.

What’s quantum dots’ future use?

In the future, quantum dots could have the potential to double the efficiency of solar cells, Giordan said.

Their strange quantum powers could produce twice as many electrons as existing technology, she explained.

“That’s amazing because we are coming closer to the limit of current solar materials,” she added.

Were quantum dots used in the past?

While quantum dots are considered on the cutting edge of science, people have probably been using them for centuries without knowing it.

The reds and yellows in stained glass windows as far as back as the 10th-century show that artists of the time unwittingly took advantage of techniques that resulted in quantum dots, according to scientists.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry on the screen: scientists Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexi Ekimov, for discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.
| Photo Credit: AP/Claudio Bresciani

The story so far: The 2023 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov on Wednesday for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots. These nanoparticles have wide-ranging applications across fields like electronics, advanced surgery, and quantum computing.

The prize itself was embroiled in some controversy earlier when the names of winners were reportedly leaked to a Swedish newspaper. But Johan Åqvist, the chair of the deciding committee, said the decision hadn’t been final at the time. “There was a press release sent out for still unknown reasons. We deeply regret that this happened. The important thing is that it did not affect the recipients in any way,” he was quoted as saying by The Guardian.

What are quantum dots?

Quantum dots are particles that are a few nanometres wide. They exhibit unique optical properties due to their small physical size. Their structure and atomic composition are the same as bulk materials, but the properties of the latter don’t depend on their size.

In fact ,the properties of quantum dots can be changed by changing their size.

At the scale of nanometres, materials and particles are capable of new, size-dependent properties because quantum physical forces start to dominate. At the macroscopic scale, on the other hand, like in our day to day lives, gravity and the rules of classical physics dominate.

By the 1970s, physicists knew that the optical properties of glass could be changed by adding a small amount of another element, like gold, silver, cadmium, sulphur, or selenium. They also knew how or why some of these changes could occur, but quantum dots as such hadn’t been synthesised yet.

The Nobel-winning research

In the early 1980s, Dr. Ekimov succeeded in creating size-dependent quantum effects in coloured glass. From 1979, he studied the properties of glasses that were tinted with copper chloride, heated to a high temperature, and then cooled. He found that different ways of preparing this glass led to it absorbing light differently. This happened because the copper chloride formed tiny crystals, and that crystals of different sizes—depending on the preparation process—interacted with light differently.

In 1983, Dr. Brus and his colleagues went a step ahead and prepared similar crystals in a liquid solution, rather than in a glass. This allowed the researchers to better manipulate and study the crystals. These crystals also interacted with light differently depending on small variations in their size.

Finally, in 1993, Dr. Bawendi and his coworkers developed a technique to make these peculiar crystals—i.e. the quantum dots—of well-defined sizes and with high optical quality. This process began by injecting some substance (of which the dot would be made) into a hot solvent and then heating the solution. Nanocrystals automatically began to take shape, and larger particles formed when the solution was heated for longer. The solvent also ensured that the crystals had a smooth outer surface.

This method was quite easy, which meant many scientists could use it to make quantum dots that they required and study them.

Modern-day applications

Today, one of the simplest applications of quantum dots is to light computer monitors and television screens. Blue LEDs behind the screen excite these dots, causing them to emit light of different colours. Combining these colours gives rise to even more colours as well as brightness.

Nanoscale-sized quantum dots are also used to map biological tissues by biochemists.

Quantum dots are also used in photovoltaic cells to improve the absorption and efficiency in converting solar light into electricity.

Certain cancer treatments use quantum dots for targeted drug delivery and other therapeutic measures. This has wider applications in the field of nanomedicine too.

Quantum dots can be used as security markers on currency and documents as an anti-counterfeit measure. Broadly, they can be used as fluorescent markers to tag and track objects.

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in Stockholm.

Quantum dots have unique properties and now spread their light from television screens and LED lamps. They catalyse chemical reactions and their clear light can illuminate tumour tissue for a surgeon, the Academy said in a press release.

Researchers have primarily utilised quantum dots to create coloured light. They believe that in the future quantum dots can contribute to flexible electronics, miniscule sensors, slimmer solar cells and perhaps encrypted quantum communication.

Today quantum dots are an important part of nanotechnology’s toolbox. The 2023 NobelPrize laureates in chemistry have all been pioneers in the exploration of the nanoworld, said the Academy.

In the early 1980s, this year’s chemistry laureates Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov succeeded in creating — independently of each other — quantum dots, which are nanoparticles so tiny that quantum effects determine their characteristics.

In 1993, chemistry laureate Moungi Bawendi revolutionised the methods for manufacturing quantum dots, making their quality extremely high — a vital prerequisite for their use in today’s nanotechnology.

“Quantum dots are thus bringing the greatest benefit to humankind. Researchers believe that in the future they could contribute to flexible electronics, tiny sensors, thinner solar cells and encrypted quantum communication – so we have just started exploring the potential of these tiny particles,” the release added.

Last year the prestigious Prize was cinched by Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry. Their work in click chemistry has been used to develop pharmaceuticals, mapping DNA while bioorthogonal chemistry refined the pharmaceuticals used to treat cancer.

On October 3, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics which was shared by Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier for “experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electro dynamics in matter.”

The Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology was granted to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their “discoveries concerning nucleoside base modification that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.”

The recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on October 5 followed by the Prize for Peace on October 6 while the Prize for Economic Sciences will be released on October 9.

The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be awarded on December 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895. 

This combo of pictures taken Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023, shows from left, French scientist Pierre Agostini posing in his apartment in Paris, Scientist Ferenc Krausz speaking during a presentation at the Max-Plank-Institute of Quantum Optics in Munich, and French-Swedish physicist Anne L’Huillier talking to journalists at Lund University, Sweden. The three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for studying how electrons zip around the atom in the tiniest fractions of seconds, a field that could one day lead to better electronics or disease diagnoses.
| Photo Credit: AP

The 2023 Nobel Prize for Physics was shared by three scientists—Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier—for their “experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses for the study of electron dynamics in matter.”

The laureates have been awarded the Prize for experiments that have allowed scientists to produce ultra-short pulses of light, with which they can finally ‘see’ directly into the super-fast world of electrons.

“Attosecond physics gives us the opportunity to understand mechanisms that are governed by electrons,” Eva Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a statement.

Also Read | Things to know about the Nobel Prizes

Why electrons weren’t ‘seen’ before

Electrons are the negatively charged particles of an atom. They zoom around the denser nucleus. Before being able to study them directly, scientists understood their properties through averages.

It is like taking a picture of a racing car. The longer the aperture of the camera is open, the blurrier the picture gets. However, if the exposure time is less, the short amount of light travelling to the camera’s sensors gives a sharper image. The lesser the exposure time, the sharper the image. Similarly, the rapid movement of electrons which occurs at less than a fraction of a second would blur together making changes in the electron impossible to observe. Scientists would have to finish measuring the processes being studied and capture the instant before the system undergoes a change. 

In 1925, when the field of quantum mechanics was still new and evolving, Werner Heisenberg’s pivotal paper proposed that the “unobservable” quantities such as the position and revolution of the electron that physicists were forced to previously should instead be based on “observable” quantities.

The experiments conducted by the Nobel Laureates have now made the “unobservable” quantities accessible. In short, the short bursts of light have illuminated the movement and changes that an electron goes through. 

How fast does an electron move?

The movement of an atom in a molecule can be studied with the very shortest pulses produced by a laser. These movements and changes in the atoms occur at the speed of a femtosecond which is a quadrillionth of a second or a millionth of a billionth of a second. This is enough to capture the heavier and larger nuclei that move at a slower pace than the electrons. However, electrons are lighter. Their movements and changes occur within one and a few hundred attoseconds—a quintillionth of a second or a billionth of a billionth of a second. 

To put it in relatable terms, the number of attoseconds in one second is the same as the number of seconds that have passed since the universe came into existence nearly 13 billion years ago. 

A flash of light, like all light, consists of a wave which begins from a point, swings up to a peak and then dips into a trough. During the 1980s, the briefest wavelength captured was within a femtosecond. This pulse of light was produced by ordinary laser systems and was considered a hard limit as the existing technology of that time could not go below a femtosecond. 

However, to see electrons, a shorter flash of light was required.

To achieve a shorter pulse of light, more and shorter wavelengths had to be combined. When a laser light is passed through a gas, it not only adds new wavelengths but also does so in the briefest amount of time. 

The laser light interacts with atoms of the gas and creates overtones. These are waves that complete a number of entire cycles for each cycle in the original wave. To put it simply, overtone is another wave that is created when the original wave interacts with the gas atoms. This overtone wave has a shorter wavelength and a higher frequency than the original one. 

In 1987, Anne L’Huillier and her colleagues at a French laboratory passed an infrared laser beam through a noble gas. The infrared light produced more and stronger overtones than the ones produced by laser light. The team also noticed that many of the overtones were of the same intensity as the beam. Through the 1990s, Dr. L’Huillier continued to explore this phenomenon and formed the theoretical foundation to achieve an experimental breakthrough. 

What creates an overtone?

When the laser light enters the gas and interacts with the atoms, it causes electromagnetic vibrations that disturb the electric field holding the electrons to the nucleus. This disturbance can cause some electrons to break free and move away from their parent atoms. However, the laser light’s continuous oscillation causes these loose electrons to reverse course and return to their nuclei, accumulating substantial extra energy along the way. To reattach to the nucleus, these electrons must release their excess energy, which is emitted as a pulse of light. These emitted light pulses, resulting from the excess energy released during the electrons’ excursion, are what create the overtones. 

The emitted overtones possess energy equivalent to ultraviolet light. These overtones have shorter wavelengths than the visible light perceivable by the human eye, and their vibration is elegantly proportional to the wavelength of the original laser pulse, reflecting the energy from the laser’s vibrations. As multiple overtones emerge, they start to interact with one another. When the peaks of these overtone waves coincide, the light becomes more intense. However, when the peak of one overtone cycle aligns with the trough of another, the light becomes less intense. Under specific conditions, these overtones can align in such a way that a sequence of ultraviolet light pulses is generated, and each pulse is incredibly short, lasting only a few hundred attoseconds. 

In 2001, Pierre Agostini and his research group in France succeeded in producing and investigating a series of consecutive light pulses. They put these consecutive light pulses along with a delayed part of the original pulse to see how the overtones interacted with each other. This experiment also gave them a duration of how long one of the pulses from the series lasted—250 attoseconds. 

Parallelly, Ferenc Krausz and his team in Austria had developed a technique that could separate an individual pulse from the string of pulses–like detaching a single carriage from a train.  

Dr. Krausz’s experiment managed to isolate one pulse that lasted for 650 seconds during which they were able to observe electrons being pulled away from their atoms. 

Thus, the attosecond world opened up to science. 

These experiments showed that the movement and changes of electrons could be studied and measured using a flash of light lasting for attoseconds. 

What are the practical implications? 

Attosecond pulses, with their remarkable ability to capture events at incredibly short time intervals, have a multitude of practical applications. They enable the exploration of intricate atomic and molecular processes, contributing to advancements in fields like materials science, electronics, and catalysis. 

In medical diagnostics, attosecond pulses can identify molecules through unique signal patterns, offering potential applications in early disease detection. Moreover, these pulses are crucial in developing faster electronic devices and facilitating research in nanotechnology. Their integration into optical technologies would aid in telecommunications, imaging, and spectroscopy capabilities.

The Nobel Prizes for 2023 in Physics has been awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier
| Photo Credit: Nobelprize.org

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electro dynamics in matter”,  The Royal Swedish Academy of Science announced on October 3, 2023.

The three Nobel Laureates in Physics 2023 are being recognised for their experiments, which have given humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules. Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier have demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy, the press release said.

Their experiments granted the Laureates to observe extremely brief events that transpire in a few tenths of attoseconds—a  quintillionth (10−18) of a second. An attosecond is so short that there are as many in one second as there have been seconds since the birth of the universe.

This brief pulses of light can be used to provide images of what occurs inside atoms and molecules.

The research conducted by the Laureates over a span of several decades allowed them to investigate processes that were so rapid that they were previously impossible to follow. This new technology is important to understand and control how electrons behave in a material.

Last year, The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for their work on quantum mechanics, the academy announced the winners on October 4, 2022. The award was given for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities, and pioneering quantum information science..

The physics prize comes a day after Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries that enabled the creation of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

On October 4, Nobel Chemistry Prize will be announced followed by the Literature price on October 5.

The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on October 9.

The prizes carry a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor ($1 million) drawn from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896. The prize money was raised by 1 million kronor this year because of the plunging value of the Swedish currency.

The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death. The prestigious peace prize is handed out in Oslo, according to his wishes, while the other award ceremony is held in Stockholm.

(With inputs from AP)

Dr. Drew Weissman arrives for the Ninth Breakthrough Prize Ceremony at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, California, U.S., April 15, 2023.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Drew Weissman’s decades of research into mRNA technology paved the way for Covid-19 vaccines, finally earning a Nobel prize for the physician-scientist.

The 64-year-old University of Pennsylvania immunologist, who won the Nobel Medicine Prize along with long-time collaborator Katalin Kariko on Monday, is far from done.

His next quests include, among others, developing a vaccine against all future coronaviruses.

“There have been three (coronavirus) pandemics or epidemics in the past 20 years,” Weissman told AFP recently, referring to the original SARS virus, MERS and Covid-19.

“You have to assume there’s going to be more, and our idea was that we could wait for the next coronavirus epidemic or pandemic, and then spend a year and a half making a vaccine. Or we could make one now.”

Twin breakthroughs

The world is now aware of the elegance of the mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) vaccines, that deliver genetic instructions to cells telling them to recreate the spike protein of the coronavirus, in order to trigger effective antibodies when they encounter the real thing.

But back when Weissman teamed up with Kariko in the 1990s, the research was considered a scientific dead-end, and working with DNA was considered a more promising avenue.

“We started working together in 1998, and that was without much funding and without much in the way of publications,” he said.

In 2005, the pair found a way to alter synthetic RNA to stop it from causing a massive inflammatory response found in animal experiments.

“Just before our paper was published, I said ‘Our phones are going to ring off the hook,'” he recalls.

“We sat there staring at our phones for five years, and they never rang!”

With a second big breakthrough in 2015, they found a new way to deliver the particles safely and effectively to their target cells, using a fatty coating called “lipid nanoparticles.”

Both developments are part of the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines today.

Helping people

Weissman grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts.

His father and mother, both since retired, were an engineer and dental hygienist, respectively.

“When I was five years old, I was diagnosed as a type-one diabetic, and back then it was testing urine and taking insulin shots a few times a day,” he recalled, and this motivated him to pursue science.

He was educated at Brandeis University and completed an MD-Phd program in immunology at Boston University.

As a young fellow at the National Institutes of Health, he worked for several years in Anthony Fauci’s lab on HIV research, before finally arriving at his long-time home Penn.

Weissman was a practicing doctor until a few years ago, and says it brings him great joy that his invention has helped save millions of lives.

“I’m a clinician scientist, my dream since starting college and medical school was to make something that helps people. I think I can say that I’ve done that. So I am incredibly happy,” he said.

Beyond vaccines, mRNA technology is also being heralded for its potential across medicine.

Weissman’s team is working on using RNA to develop a single-injection gene therapy to overcome the defect that causes sickle cell anemia, a genetic blood disease that 200,000 babies are born with in Africa every year.

Significant technical challenges remain to ensure the treatment is able to correctly edit genes and is safe, but the researchers are hopeful.

Bone marrow transplant, an expensive treatment with serious risks, is currently the only cure.

Hungarian biochemist Katalin Kariko poses for a photo in Budapest, Hungary, May 27, 2021. Two scientists have won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday, Oct. 2, 2023 for discoveries that enabled the development of mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. The award was given to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. Karikó is a professor at Sagan’s University in Hungary and an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
| Photo Credit: AP

Hungarian-born scientist Katalin Kariko’s obsession with researching a substance called mRNA to fight disease once cost her a faculty position at a prestigious US university, which dismissed the idea as a dead end.

Now, her pioneering work — which paved the way for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines — has won her the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Kariko, 68, spent much of the 1990s writing grant applications to fund her research into “messenger ribonucleic acid” — genetic molecules that tell cells what proteins to make, essential to keeping our bodies alive and healthy.

She believed mRNA held the key to treating diseases where having more of the right kind of protein can help — like repairing the brain after a stroke.

But the University of Pennsylvania, where Kariko was on track for a professorship, decided to pull the plug after the grant rejections piled up.

Also Read | India-made mRNA vaccine priced at ₹2,292, will be available as a booster dose

“I was up for promotion, and then they just demoted me and expected that I would walk out the door,” she told AFP in an interview from her home in Philadelphia in December 2020.

Kariko didn’t yet have a green card and needed a job to renew her visa. She also knew she wouldn’t be able to put her daughter through college without the hefty staff discount.

She decided to persist as a lower-rung researcher, scraping by on a meagre salary.

It was a low point in her life and career, but “I just thought…you know, the (lab) bench is here, I just have to do better experiments,” she said.

The determination runs in the family — her daughter Susan Francia did go to UPenn, where she earned a master’s degree, and won gold medals with the US Olympic rowing team in 2008 and 2012.

Twin breakthroughs

By the late 1980s, much of the scientific community was focused on using DNA to deliver gene therapy, but Kariko believed that mRNA was also promising since most diseases are not hereditary and don’t need solutions that permanently alter our genetics.

First though, she had to overcome a major problem: in animal experiments, synthetic mRNA was causing a massive inflammatory response as the immune system sensed an invader and rushed to fight it.

Explained | Who is manufacturing India’s mRNA vaccine?  

Kariko, together with her main collaborator and co-winner Drew Weissman, discovered that one of the four building blocks of the synthetic mRNA was at fault — and they could overcome the problem by swapping it out with a modified version.

They published a paper on the breakthrough in 2005. Then, in 2015, they found a new way to deliver mRNA into mice, using a fatty coating called “lipid nanoparticles” that prevent the mRNA from degrading, and help place it inside the right part of cells.

Both these innovations were key to the Covid-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, where Kariko is now a senior vice president, as well as the shots produced by Moderna.

Both work by giving human cells the instructions to make a surface protein of the coronavirus, which simulates an infection and trains the immune system for when it encounters the real virus.

Explained | How can mRNA vaccines help fight cancer? 

New treatments

Though she does not want to make too much of it, as a foreign-born woman in a male-dominated field, Kariko occasionally felt underestimated — saying people would approach after lectures and ask “Who’s your supervisor?”

“They were always thinking, ‘That woman with the accent, there must be somebody behind her who is smarter or something,'” she said.

Yet the Nobel is just the latest accolade for Kariko, who has won the Breakthrough Prize, the L’Oreal-UNESCO prize for women in science awards, among many others.

It is a far cry from the time when her late mother would call every year after prize announcements to ask why she hadn’t been chosen.

“I never in my life get (federal) grants, I am nobody, not even faculty,” she would reply with a laugh.

To which her mother would reply: “But you work so hard!”

The Nobel Prizes for 2023 in Medicine or Physiology has been awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman

This year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has been jointly awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their “discoveries concerning nucleoside base modification that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19”, The Royal Swedish Academy of Science announced on October 2, 2023.

Through their groundbreaking findings, which have fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system, the laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times, the press release said.

Last year the Nobel Prize for Physiology was awarded to Swedish scientist Svante Pääbo “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.” Dr. Pääbo’s pioneering work in an entirely new discipline—paleogenomics—has helped the scientific community understand human evolution and migration at a deeper level.

Thanks to his groundbreaking research, we now have a genome sequence of our closest hominin relatives—the Neanderthals. Dr. Pääbo and his group has also analysed several additional genome sequence from extinct hominins.

The Prize for Physiology or Medicine kicks off a week of Nobel Prize announcements. The winners for Physics will be announced on October 3, followed by Chemistry on October 4. The winners of the Literature, Peace and Economic Sciences Prize will be declared on October 5, October 6 and October 9 respectively.

The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be awarded on December 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895. 

Fall has arrived in Scandinavia, which means Nobel Prize season is here.

The start of October is when the Nobel committees get together in Stockholm and Oslo to announce the winners of the yearly awards.

First up, as usual, is the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology, which will be announced Monday by a panel of judges at the Karolinska Institute in the Swedish capital. The prizes in physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics will follow, with one announcement every weekday until October 9.

Here are some things to know about the Nobel Prizes:

The Nobel Prizes were created by Alfred Nobel, a 19th-century businessman and chemist from Sweden. He held more than 300 patents but his claim to fame before the Nobel Prizes was having invented dynamite by mixing nitroglycerine with a compound that made the explosive more stable.

Also Read | Chemistry Nobel goes to trio for development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry

Dynamite soon became popular in construction and mining as well as in the weapons industry. It made Nobel a very rich man. Perhaps it also made him think about his legacy, because toward the end of his life he decided to use his vast fortune to fund annual prizes “to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.”

The first Nobel Prizes were presented in 1901, five years after his death. In 1968, a sixth prize was created, for economics, by Sweden’s central bank. Though Nobel purists stress that the economics prize is technically not a Nobel Prize, it’s always presented together with the others.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, Nobel decided that the peace prize should be awarded in Norway and the other prizes in Sweden. Nobel historians suspect Sweden’s history of militarism may have been a factor.

During Nobel’s lifetime, Sweden and Norway were in a union, which the Norwegians reluctantly joined after the Swedes invaded their country in 1814. It’s possible that Nobel thought Norway would be a more suitable location for a prize meant to encourage “fellowship among nations.”

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To this day, the Nobel Peace Prize is a completely Norwegian affair, with the winners selected and announced by a Norwegian committee. The peace prize even has its own ceremony in the Norwegian capital of Oslo on Dec. 10 — the anniversary of Nobel’s death — while the other prizes are presented in Stockholm.

The Nobel Prizes project an aura of being above the political fray, focused solely on the benefit of humanity. But the peace and literature awards, in particular, are sometimes accused of being politicized. Critics question whether winners are selected because their work is truly outstanding or because it aligns with the political preferences of the judges.

The scrutiny can get intense for high-profile awards, such as in 2009, when President Barack Obama won the peace prize less than a year after taking office.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee is an independent body that insists its only mission is to carry out the will of Alfred Nobel. However, it does have links to Norway’s political system. The five members are appointed by the Norwegian Parliament, so the panel’s composition reflects the power balance in the legislature.

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To avoid the perception that the prizes are influenced by Norway’s political leaders, sitting members of the Norwegian government or Parliament are barred from serving on the committee. Even so, the panel isn’t always viewed as independent by foreign countries. When imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the peace prize in 2010, Beijing responded by freezing trade talks with Norway. It took years for Norway-China relations to be restored.

One reason the prizes are so famous is they come with a generous amount of cash. The Nobel Foundation, which administers the awards, raised the prize money by 10% this year to 11 million kronor (about $1 million). In addition to the money, the winners receive an 18-carat gold medal and diploma when they collect their Nobel Prizes at the award ceremonies in December.

Most winners are proud and humbled by joining the pantheon of Nobel laureates, from Albert Einstein to Mother Teresa. But two winners refused their Nobel Prizes: French writer Jean-Paul Sartre, who turned down the literature prize in 1964, and Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho, who declined the peace prize that he was meant to share with U.S. diplomat Henry Kissinger in 1973.

Several others were not able to receive their awards because they were imprisoned, such as Belarusian pro-democracy activist Ales Bialiatski, who shared last year’s peace prize with human rights groups in Ukraine and Russia.

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Historically, the vast majority of Nobel Prize winners have been white men. Though that’s started to change, there is still little diversity among Nobel winners, particularly in the science categories.

To date, 60 women have won Nobel Prizes, including 25 in the scientific categories. Only four women have won the Nobel Prize in physics and just two have won the economics prize.

In the early days of the Nobel Prizes, the lack of diversity among winners could be explained by the lack of diversity among scientists in general. But today critics say the judges need to do a better job at highlighting discoveries made by women and scientists outside Europe and North America.

The prize committees say their decisions are based on scientific merit, not gender, nationality or race. However, they are not deaf to the criticism. Five years ago, the head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said it had started to ask nominating bodies to make sure they don’t overlook “women or people of other ethnicities or nationalities in their nominations.”