From Albert Einstein to Alexander Fleming, the Nobel Prizes have celebrated scientists’ necessary work for decades – but who took the top spots this year?
For over 100 years since its beginnings in Stockholm in 1901, the categories have awarded a wide variety of research. They honour significant scientific contributions to humankind, such as the discovery of the double helix in DNA, radioactivity, and penicillin.
Winners include Marie Curie, the first woman to ever receive an award in 1903 for her discovery of radioactivity, and then a prize in chemistry in 1911 for her work in isolating radium.
They’ve celebrated many notable scientists across the century, including Frederick Sanger in 1958 for developing the amino acid sequence of insulin, and again his second prize in 1980 for creating the first DNA sequencing method.
However, years and many technological developments later, this year’s winners include the discovery of a completely new class of RNA molecules, as well as an AI model that can predict protein structures.
Not only do the recipients of each prize gain global recognition for their investigations, they also receive approximately 11,000,000 Swedish kroner, which equates to around £800,000.
Winners of each category are also awarded a 2k karat green-gold medal, alongside a diploma. The funds for this come from the Nobel Foundation, the organisation, named after its founder, chemist Albert Nobel, who set up the concept of the ‘Nobel Prize’.
The Physics Prize
The two Nobel Laureates this year were awarded to two physicists – John Hopfield, an American professor emeritus at Princeton University, and Geoffrey Hinton, an English-Canadian professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, for their work in creating artificial networks to retrieve information.
Their collaborative work was inspired by the human brain, to create similar but artificial neural networks that restore and retrieve memories, much like humans. Hopfield’s work, ‘The Hopfield Network’ began in 1982, and is a ‘neural net’ that consists of one layer of ‘n’ fully connected recurrent neurons, each connected to every other except themself. These neurons work together to recover complete patterns from an input, even if the data is partial or corrupt.
Hinton, a computer scientist, made headlines last year after leaving his post at Google, citing concerns for the future of AI in technology. However he developed Hopfield’s network from 1983-1985 to create a new artificial neuron network, the new ‘Boltzmann Machine’. It can be used to recognise similar characteristic elements within a set of data, which is important now in classifying images and creating similar ones from the pattern upon which it was trained. It is now used similarly across the world in systems like facial recognition, and AI powered functions like ChatGPT and Gemini.
The Chemistry Prize
David Baker has been using chemistry to create entirely new proteins, a previously impossible task, and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have been using AI to predict proteins’ complex structures.
“One of the discoveries being recognised this year concerns the construction of spectacular proteins. The other is about fulfilling a 50-year-old dream: predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences. Both of these discoveries open up vast possibilities,” says Heiner Linke, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
The prize this year concerns proteins – they’re made up of amino acids and can be found everywhere; whether it be hormones, antibodies or building blocks of tissues. In 2003, Baker used amino acids to design new proteins that were dissimilar to any others – since this, he and his team have created many new proteins which can be used as vaccines, pharmaceuticals, or tiny sensors.
In 2020, Hassabis and Jumper created an AI model called AlphaFold 2. From this, they were able to predict the structure of almost 200 million proteins identified by researchers. This has paved the way for research of antibiotic resistance and even enzymes that can decompose plastic.
The Physiology or Medicine Prize
Victor Ambros, who works at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Gary Ruvkun, who works at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, were awarded this year’s Prize for their discovery of microRNA – which are a tiny class of molecules that play a huge role in gene regulation. The duo were postdoctoral researchers in the same group who published their first key discoveries in 1993.
Gene regulation is what differs our muscle and nerve cells from each other, through distinct characteristics. MicroRNA are essential in this process to control gene activity via transcription. A single microRNA can viciously alter the activity of hundreds of different genes.This research has proven how important microRNAs are in the development and functions of organisms. If there is abnormal regulation by microRNA, this can contribute to cancer, as well as causing conditions such as hearing loss and skeletal disorders, proving why research on the subject is so significant.
