The British pianist and composer George Benjamin, 64, prefers not to accept commissions, even if he loses large sums of money. He does not want delivery deadlines or preconditions, but rather to concentrate as long as necessary on an original score, which renews the creative possibilities of contemporary music. Benjamin collected this Thursday in Bilbao along with 16 researchers the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards from the BBVA Foundation, endowed with 400,000 euros in each category. The night before, the award-winning scientists attended a concert with music by Benjamin that sounded like a metaphor for basic research: the entire Madrid Symphony Orchestra beating in the high register, traveling along paths never before explored, very far from the melodies. traditional.
Benjamin talks about this creative process in the book The rules of the game: “I need a certain vital period to pass after the composition, a time of forgetfulness. The period of work on a work is so obsessive that, to get out of that world, I need time […]. If he tried to write in that period I know that he would only write a bad copy of the recently completed work. The word obsession is repeated in some biographies of the winners.
The biochemist Peter Walter, born 69 years ago in Berlin, was one of the winners in the Biology and Biomedicine category. Walter is the discoverer of the response to misfolded proteins, a mechanism by cells to eliminate proteins that become toxic. The biochemist, from the University of California in San Francisco (USA), and his colleague Carmela Sidrauski have detected a molecule involved in this process, ISRIB call, which has seemingly miraculous effects in mice, improving their brain capabilities, such as memory and mental agility. The specialized website STAT defined it like this: “Walter is fascinated—some might say obsessed—with the tiny molecule his laboratory has discovered.”
The German scientist has shared the prize with three other researchers who have revealed the mechanisms that control the functioning of proteins: Franz-Ulrich Hartl, director of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry, in Munich (Germany); Arthur Horwich, from Yale University (USA); and Kazutoshi Mori, from Kyoto University (Japan). The phenomena they have observed are related to a multitude of diseases, such as cancer, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
The French glaciologist Jean Jouzel has been one of the five winners in the Climate Change category. This 77-year-old researcher collaborated from France in the legendary scientific expedition that, in the midst of the Cold War, reached the Soviet Antarctic base Vostok, in an obsessive search for the purest ancient ice. The analyzes by Jouzel and his colleagues at the Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission (CEA) culminated in three studies, published in 1987which definitively confirmed the relationship between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global warming.
Jouzel has collected the award together with the Danish Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, from the University of Copenhagen; the French Valérie Masson-Delmotte, from the University of Paris-Saclay; and the Swiss Jakob Schwander and Thomas Stocker, from the University of Bern. They all study air bubbles trapped in ice, relics of the atmosphere of the past. “Understanding and extracting the wealth of climate information from the majestic three-kilometer-long ice cores, drilled from the surface to the bedrock of the great Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, has been an innovative and exciting journey. challenges,” Dahl-Jensen proclaimed in his speech at the Euskalduna Palace in Bilbao.
Two Mexican researchers, Rodolfo Dirzo and Gerardo Ceballos, have won in the Ecology and Conservation Biology category for their work on the extinction of species. Dirzo, from Stanford University (USA), coined the term “defaunation”, analogous to deforestation, to refer to the absence of animals in an ecosystem. The scientist celebrated in his speech that, this Thursday, the Iberian lynx is no longer in danger of extinction. Dirzo, however, has warned that humanity has become “the driving force of what is emerging as a new mass extinction, the sixth in the last 542 million years of planetary biological evolution.”
The jury has also rewarded the originality of Elke Weber, a German psychologist from Princeton University (USA) who has studied the human response to climate change with a novel psychological approach. “Humans—the Homo sapiens, we—do not necessarily make decisions in a strictly rational manner. The bias of the present, the fear of loss and other systematic deviations from economic rationality lead us to make many decisions that do not benefit us in the long term,” she warned.
Two mathematicians, the French Claire Voisin and the American of Soviet origin Yakov Eliashberg, have been awarded in the Basic Sciences category. Both researchers, she from the Jussieu-Paris Rive Gauche Mathematics Institute and he from Stanford University, have connected algebraic and symplectic geometries, two disciplines that explore spaces unimaginable for the common citizen.
Finally, the Japanese Takeo Kanade, from Carnegie Mellon University (USA), has received the award in the Information and Communication Technologies category, for creating computer programs three decades ago that accurately recognize facial features and expressions, advances that are now omnipresent in mobile phones. In Economics, the winner was Partha Dasgupta, a researcher at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom) who has provided tools to measure sustainable development.
The Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, created by the BBVA Foundation in 2008, have awarded on 26 occasions to people who have subsequently won a Nobel. The largest scientific organization in Spain, the Higher Council for Scientific Research, participates in the evaluation of the nominations. Its president, Eloísa del Pino, has proclaimed that the message of these awards is that “only from the diversity of scientific disciplines can we aspire to know the extraordinary universe in which we live.”
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