2011 Nobel Prize Recap

It’s that time! Time to go over this year’s science Nobel Prize winners. Keep in mind that a maximum of 3 people are awarded a prize, whereas there can be a large number of other contributing individuals who aren’t recognized. Science is generally and increasingly a very collaborative business.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Bruce Beutler, Jules Hoffman and Ralph Steinman, for their discoveries about the immune system. The first two discovered the Toll system, an integral part of the innate immune system (which I discussed earlier). Without the Toll protein or its receptor, “organisms are extremely vulnerable to infection.” Ralph Steinman, who sadly passed away a few days before receiving the prize, discovered the important role of a type of cell called dendritic cells in transmitting information between the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system, allowing it to “remember” invaders.

Nobel Prize in Physics: Adam Riess, Brian Schmidt and Saul Perlmutter, for discovering that the expansion of the universe was speeding up. This was a huge revolution in our understanding of the universe; until then, it was assumed that the expansion of the universe was slowing due to the force of gravity. To explain it, a mysterious “dark energy” was hypothesized to be working against the force of gravity, I guess in line with the nomenclature of “dark matter” to explain the mysterious source of gravity in the universe not attributable to regular matter. 

Interestingly, just a few days ago another possible explanation to replace dark energy was published, called “dark flow“. It posits that the movement of our own galaxy is skewing our measurements of the rest of the universe’s acceleration, and that the accelerating expansion is actually illusory. It doesn’t seem to be as strong of an explanation as dark energy yet, but maybe it will be eventually. 

Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Daniel Schechtman, for the discovery of quasicrystals, “materials that have ordered but not periodic structures”. He found that molecules could be organized in ways previously thought impossible, and there was a ton of resistance against his discoveries that he had to painfully overcome; notably, he won the award individually, since it seems like no one else would touch his research. You should read this Physics World article on it, it’s pretty interesting. 

Well! There we have it, for this year. Apparently every year there’s controversy about the Nobel Prizes; about the 3-person cap on awards, about the outdated categories… I actually was surprised at the categories myself. Science has changed a lot in the last 116 years; the most prominent awards in science should try to keep up.

Notable Nobel Prize Winners of the Past

The Nobel prizes are being announced this week, so there’s quite a lot about them being written write now. I’ll probably talk about the actual winners for this year later, but for now Live Science presents “The 10 Noblest Nobel Prize Winners of All Time”, including Albert Einstein and Marie Curie, who you know I’m a fan of.

I won’t summarize the article since it’s already made of brief points and I don’t want to detract any more from the awesome prize-winning discoveries/acts. You should check it out and find out what the best of the best did to earn their prizes, and if you’d like me to write a post about anything you see that interests you, just let me know and I’d be happy to oblige.

Marie Curie, a Science Idol

The Smithsonian has an article about the glory that is Marie Curie, since this year is the 100-year anniversary of her 2nd Nobel prize. Marie Curie is a crazy figure in science history – I can’t even imagine how intelligent and driven she must have been. I managed to visit her tomb in Paris a few years ago and it was certainly the most important such visit for me while I was there, writers and philosophers be damned.

Marie Curie discovered polonium (guess her nationality) and radium, she discovered radioactivity, she was the first person to ever win two Nobel prizes, the only person to ever win in two different sciences (physics and chemistry) – and she did it as a woman at the turn of the 20th century, without fancy things like a research position or funding, and all before she hit 45. She was also the first woman to win a Nobel prize, naturally. From the article:

In 1903, Curie became the first woman in France to earn a PhD in physics. Professors who reviewed her doctoral thesis, which was about radiation, declared that it was the greatest single contribution to science ever written.

She kept researching up until her death – which probably would’ve been later if she hadn’t been researching radioactivity, before they knew about the whole it-kills-you thing. 

Oh, and just for fun, her daughter and son-in-law won a Nobel prize in chemistry too, while her other son-in-law was the director of UNICEF when UNICEF was given a Nobel peace prize. If we’re going to get into Nobel-by-marriage, I may as well mention that she shared her first Nobel prize with her husband. That family had more Nobel prizes than a normal family has toothbrushes.  

Reading about people like Marie Curie, I can’t help but feel like, “Well… that’s definitely not me. I guess I can cross ‘famous scientist’ off my list of things I can be when I grow up.” But I guess people like her need people like me to make some itty bitty discoveries beforehand, so I’ll try to do my part.

Edit: I later learned about the other son-in-law’s Nobel, so I added that above.