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The so-called scientific Nobels include Medicine, Physics and Chemistry. The first is awarded by the Karolinska Institute, while the other two are awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to the Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo for, according to the statement from the Nobel Committee of the Karolinska Institute, laying the foundations that allowed the development of “a completely new scientific discipline, paleogenomics.
By revealing the genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, their discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human.”
In other words, Pääbo’s work consisted of identifying the Neanderthal genome and showing that homo sapiens had sex and children with them. In addition, only from DNA he managed to identify a new species: the Denisovans.
One of the key findings of Pääbo’s work demonstrates that interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens as a recurring practice thousands of years ago caused all humans born outside of Africa to carry a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA in each of them. your cells. Those genes have also determined how the immune system works or how people can live at high altitudes.
Pääbo is considered the father of paleogenomics and his colleagues classify him as a visionary with a strong temperament. He currently he is the head of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany.
Nobel Prize in Physics to the pioneers of quantum communication
The Nobel Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the award to the Frenchman Alain Aspect, the American John Francis Clauser and the Austrian Anton Zeilinger, considered pioneers of quantum communication.
The release explains that what happens to one particle in an entangled pair determines what happens to the other, even if they are far enough apart to affect each other. The development of experimental tools by the laureates has laid the foundations for a new era in quantum technology…
The work is based on the theories of John Stewart Bell, who in 1964 assured that if two particles had an interaction at a distance, it was not due to hidden variables, in other words, instructions that told these particles what result they should give in an experiment. . Years later, Clauser confirmed the theory in a laboratory, and then Aspect and Zeilinger separately were even more precise in their experiments.
Last but not least, there is the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, also awarded by the Swedish Academy, which this year went to Barry Sharpless, Morten Meldal and Carolyn Bertozzi.
Sharpless and Meldal are considered pioneers of the so-called click chemistry and Bertozzi managed to apply it inside living cells.
Sharpless began the path when, around the year 2000, he laid the foundations for click chemistry, a simple and reliable modality where reactions occur quickly and unwanted by-products are avoided.
Then, both Sharpless and Meldal, working separately, created the procedure known as copper-catalyzed alkyne-azide cycloaddition, a reaction now used to make drugs, map DNA, and create new materials.
Finally, Bertozzi was able to map glycans, some sugars that are on the surface of cells and that are biological markers of cancer.
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