The Nobel Prize

"I was described as a dreamer, a fantasist, even as the village idiot. I didn't care. What I cared about was convincing people to allow me to go on with my work." In the late 1970s, Yonath decided to focus on one of the mysteries of living cells: protein biosynthesis. She began with ribosomes, where protein synthesis occurs. These were still a puzzle to scientists because they had yet to determine ribosomes' molecular structure. Normally one would use X-ray crystallography to map the structure of a molecule. But given its size, lack of internal symmetry and instability, the ribosome was considered impossible to crystallise – and Yonath was considered a dreamer or a fool for trying. It took 25,000 tries – and the revelation that ribosomes from organisms that live under harsh conditions would be hardier during crystallisation. In the early 1980s, Yonath finally managed to crystallise a desert bacteria known as Geobacillus stearothermophilus. The next step was to figure out a way to pass X-rays through the crystal without damaging its structure. The answer was cryo-bio-crystallography. Yonath developed this method of blasting the crystals at –185°C before X-raying them in order to protect their crystalline structures. By the mid-1990s, Yonath’s success had drawn other researchers into the effort. The wider team worked closely for several years, and in 2000 and 2001 reached the summit of their climb: they successfully mapped in three dimensions both subunits of the bacterial ribosome, for the very first time. For this achievement, in the face of daunting odds and widespread derision, Yonath was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, along with crystallographers Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz.

Since the atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, nuclear weapons have threatened our world and have had catastrophic consequences for humanity. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was founded in 2007 to mobilise people worldwide to support a ban on nuclear weapons. ICAN planned and implemented several inter-governmental conferences that focused on the humanitarian consequences of a nuclear war. Their advocacy contributed to the United Nations General Assembly’s adoption in 2016 of a resolution to commence negotiations on an international legal prohibition of nuclear weapons. In 2017 the organisation was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work. Among their victories is the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the first multilateral legally-binding instrument for nuclear disarmament to have been negotiated in 20 years. It was adopted on 7 July 2017.

When Camillo Golgi began studying the brain's grey matter, the existing techniques used to stain cells marked almost all parts of this dense tissue simultaneously. This revealed nearly no information about the brain's finer details. Golgi experimented by candlelight in a hospital kitchen that he converted into a laboratory. In this laboratory, Golgi discovered a way of impregnating nervous tissue with a silver solution. The method stained only a few nerve cells in black, making it possible to view neurons in their entirety. Golgi could see the complex outlines and details of numerous branches. Golgi’s silver nerve staining method went unappreciated until Ramón y Cajal enhanced its resolution. Armed with a microscope, pen and paper, Cajal created thousands of beautiful drawings depicting the intricate details of nervous tissue – which resembled a forest of outstretched trees to him. From his observations, Cajal developed the theory that the brain and spinal cord are made up of countless numbers of individual functional units. However, when the 1906 medicine prize was awarded, Golgi did not support the neuron theory for which Cajal had provided so much evidence. Golgi still interpreted the observations to indicate that the nervous system was a seamless continuous network, forming an entirely distinct anatomical entity. Despite their differences, Golgi and Cajal became the first scientists to share the medicine prize. Learn more: https://bit.ly/2WxPIs3

Is it possible to 'see' quantum mechanics in action? In a podcast conversation, chemistry laureate Moungi Bawendi speaks about the incredible gratification of visualising quantum mechanics and how his collaboration with co-laureate Louis Brus started. Listen here: https://lnkd.in/eUA9wtbj

Less than 100 years ago, prostate cancer which attacks a gland that is part of the male sex organ, was seen as a death sentence because so little was known about it. Thankfully, around 1940, Charles Huggins showed that the course of the disease can be affected by hormones. A series of experiments showed that if the production of male sex hormone is prevented or if female sex hormone is added, the cancer could be counteracted. Huggins’ discovery was put to almost immediate practical use, and soon gave many valuable and relatively symptom-free years to gravely ill cancer patients. This was a completely new type of cancer therapy, capable of helping a previously unaccessible category of patients, by the administration of non-toxic, naturally occurring hormones rather than by toxic or radioactive agents, and with few side effects. In addition to offering hope to men with prostatic cancer, Huggins also developed hormone treatment for breast cancer. Learn more about this pioneering researcher: https://lnkd.in/e_Qxdhnt Photo: Xenograft Model to Study Prostate Cancer.

“My mother had a biology/zoology class that ran late so I would sometimes attend the class with my mother, sitting on her lap, reading the text, and listening to the lectures. It was clear how my parents, the professors and students valued education, and that they were discovering and understanding things about the outdoors that I played in everyday. I liked the respect that the other students and professors gave my mother for being a good student, and that they tolerated me being in the class and sometimes explained things to me. The seriousness of learning was tempered with fun, so it was a wonderful place to be and opened up a whole new way of understanding the world as a child. I still spent a lot of time outside exploring nature but now tried to tie that to reason and a network of knowledge.” - physics laureate George Smoot on his childhood memories with his mother who was a teacher. #NobelPrize

"My lab has been so well-tuned it feels like a really good band." Not only is 2018 medicine laureate James Allison an award-winning scientist, but he's also an accomplished musician. Here, he shares the similarities between scientific research and playing music.

Carbon is an element that can assume a number of different forms. In nature, for example, it can be found as graphite or diamonds. In 1985, Robert Curl, Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley discovered a brand new form - the fullerene. Curl, Kroto and Smalley irradiated a surface of graphite with laser pulses so that carbon gas was formed. When the gas condensed, previously unknown structures with 60 and 70 carbon atoms were formed. The most common structure had 60 carbon atoms arranged in a sphere with five and six edges - also known as a buckyball, the shape resembles a football. The structures were called fullerenes in honour of architect Buckminster Fuller, who worked with this geometric shape.

“‘A man who knows everything.’ This, reportedly, was my reply to a school teacher asking me what I’d like to become when I grow up. I was eight years old, or thereabouts, and what I wanted to say was ‘professor’, but, still not knowing everything, I had forgotten that word. And what I really meant was ‘scientist’, someone who unravels the secrets of the fundamental Laws of Nature.” Gerardus 't Hooft was awarded the 1999 physics prize “for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics.” Read his biography: https://bit.ly/2MNTI5B

“I was a hyperactive kid. Back then they didn't treat hyperactivity […] I used sports and martial arts as a way of controlling my hyperactivity and being able to focus, and I think those are really critical to be a good scientist because if you're bouncing off the walls, you can’t formulate hypotheses. That helped me overcome that that hyperactivity.” - medicine laureate Drew Weissman. He shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Katalin Karikó “for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.” Learn more about Weissman in our interview: https://lnkd.in/eSCvSU8B