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The makers at Biontech or Moderna were highly regarded for the Nobel Prize award – but this year it goes to the developers of a different technology.
Stockholm – The winners are two molecular biologists: This year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine goes to US researchers David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian. They received the award for their “groundbreaking discoveries” on the receptors for temperature and touch in the human body. This was announced by the Nobel Assembly in Stockholm in Sweden on Monday.
With their research results, Julius and Patapoutian explained “how heat, cold and mechanical pressure trigger the nerve impulses with which we perceive the world and adapt to it”.
The 65-year-old Julius, who is a professor at the University of California in San Francisco, and Patapoutian, born in Lebanon in 1967 and doing research at the Scripps Institute in California, will share the prize money of ten million kroner (around 985,000 euros).
Biontech founder at Nobel Prize: activists against award
Due to the global scale of the coronavirus pandemic, this year many had expected that research will be recognized that will help contain the coronavirus. The mRNA process, for example, on which the corona vaccines from Biontech / Pfizer and Moderna are based, has quickly proven its value in the fight against the pandemic.
A worldwide network of aid organizations has spoken out against an award of the Mainz corona vaccine developer Biontech with the Nobel Prize for Medicine. The signatories of a letter to the Nobel Prize Committee published on Friday October 1st recognize Biontech’s scientific achievement as “exceptional”. However, they criticize the company for refusing to “share the successful vaccine recipe with manufacturers in developing countries”.
Nobel Prize 2021: Changes in tradition due to the corona pandemic
Last year, the two US researchers Harvey Alter and Charles Rice, as well as their British colleague Michael Houghton, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their discovery of the hepatitis C virus.
The award of the Nobel Prize for Medicine marks the beginning of the Nobel Prize series. The award in the physics category will be given on Tuesday, followed by chemistry on Wednesday. After the award of the Literature Prize on Thursday, it is the turn of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and, on Monday, the award in the business category.
The Nobel Prizes are traditionally presented on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of the founder Alfred Nobel. Because of the corona pandemic, the awards in the science categories and the literature prize will again not be presented at a big ceremony in Stockholm this year, but in the respective home countries of the awardees (AFP / dpa / frs)