The Spanish scientist Eva Nogales He is in the pools to win the Nobel Prize. His biography is unusual in these awards. “My father was a sheepherder and my mother was an embroiderer. They couldn't finish basic education because they had to go to work when they were 11 or 12 years old,” explains Nogales, born 58 years ago in the Madrid town of Colmenar Viejo. Her parents' obsession was to save so that her children could study. Nogales entered the Faculty of Physics of the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1983, in the midst of the Madrid scene. “There were a lot of parties, a lot of drugs, a lot of sex, but I had no money and I was a nerd. I missed the move, I was in the library,” she remembers with a laugh. The researcher has just collected a prize of more than one million euros, the Shaw, awarded in Hong Kong and considered the eastern Nobel. One in seven winners has finished winning too the Nobel.
All people were first a single cell, the result of the union of an egg and a sperm. That solitary cell already has exclusive DNA, a manual with enough instructions to multiply and become a unique human being, with 30 billion cells. A molecular machinery reads that DNA and, depending on the sections it reads, the cell will become a neuron in the brain, a red blood cell or any other type of cell. Nogales, who has spent half his life at the University of California at Berkeley (United States), has managed to visualize for the first time, atom by atom, the convoluted structure of the main proteins that read DNA. This reading process, called transcription, is essential in life and death. When it fails, it can lead to serious diseases, such as cancer.
The American geneticist Francis Collinsa devout Christian and former director of the Human Genome Project, calls DNA “the language of God”. At the Shaw Award ceremony, Eva Nogales showed a picture of herself as a girl, at her first communion. “I was 10 years old when she died. [el dictador Francisco] Frank. We were all raised in religion, we prayed every day at school. We believed in guardian angels and things like that. I had a lot of faith, I was a catechist, but there was a certain moment in which I began to be more critical and began to see holes, both from the theological and social points of view,” he explains. “Between one thing and another, in the end I quit. Religions exist everywhere because we want to give meaning to our lives and our deaths, which scare us. Religion has a role. “I would love to believe,” he says.
Nogales, passing through Madrid to celebrate Christmas with his family in Colmenar Viejo, answers questions from EL PAÍS in a room at the National Cancer Research Center, with which he collaborates.
—You study the matter of life at the atomic level. What are we made of?
—Well, atoms, like everything else. Our atoms they come from supernovas [explosiones de estrellas] and things like that. We are mostly carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen. Phosphorus, which is part of DNA, is also important. In the end we are made of super simple atoms, but combined in thousands of different ways.
The American chemist Roger Kornberg He won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry after describing the structure of a protein involved in reading DNA. “Life is chemistry, nothing more and nothing less, although people resist the idea,” Kornberg stated in an interview with this newspaper four years ago. Eva Nogales, being a biophysicist, agrees: “Life is chemistry. In the end, in biology, everything is chemistry.” The researcher emphasizes that the enormous complexity of the proteins of all living beings is built with only 20 amino acids, molecules that act like 20 different Lego pieces. “With only 20 units we have all the beauty of life, from a bacteria to an elephant, including a sea sponge,” Nogales proclaims.
The Shaw Prize was established in 2004 by Run Run Shaw, a Hong Kong film and press magnate, producer of legendary kung-fu films, such as The Shaolin Avengersand global hits, such as blade runner. Shaw, a wealthy patron who died a decade ago, wanted to reward scientists who illuminate the intricate mysteries of nature, such as Eva Nogales, who shared the award with her colleague Patrick Cramerpresident of the Max Planck Society, Germany.
Nogales has learned to master the electron cryomicroscope, a revolutionary instrument capable of to photograph molecules essential for life, at temperatures of about 180 degrees below zero. Its inventors won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Nogales team takes “a million photos” of the same protein and combines the images with supercomputers until obtaining the three-dimensional structure, atom by atom. His group at Berkeley has thus revealed the shape of key proteins, such as tau, which forms tangles within the brain cells of people with Alzheimer's; either telomerasewhich is activated in cancer cells and causes them to multiply without restraint.
“You can't fix a car if you don't know how it works, first you have to know its engine under normal conditions. And the same thing happens with nature,” warns Nogales. His first major scientific success came in 1998, when his group revealed the structure of tubulin, a protein that acts as the skeleton of cells. The discovery was the cover story of the magazine Nature, showcase of the best world science. “EL PAÍS told it on an entire page that Sunday and I became famous in my town,” she remembers with a laugh.
Biophysics also revealed in 2014 how paclitaxel works, a drug that has saved millions of lives thanks to its effectiveness against breast, ovarian and lung cancer, among others. The drug—based on an extract of bark from a North American tree, the Pacific yew—binds to tubulins and causes tumor cells to stop multiplying. That same year, together with his colleague Jennifer Doudna, Nogales elucidated the structure of Cas9, a key protein in the revolutionary CRISPR gene editing system. Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The 87-year-old mother from Nogales can proudly walk from 2021 along a street that bears her daughter's full name: Evangelina Nogales de la Morena Avenue in Colmenar Viejo. Her father died before he could see her. Biophysics moved to Berkeley in 1993, but reclaims its roots. The day after the interview with this newspaper, Nogales met with the three teachers from the Colmenareño institute who made him fall in love with science more than 40 years ago: Ana Cañas, who taught him Physics; Ana de Frutos, Biology; and Avelina Lucas, from Mathematics. The day he collected the Shaw Award in Hong Kong, Nogales took the stage with a Manila shawl bought at Puerta del Sol in Madrid: “They are beautiful and I can't think of a more Spanish accessory!”
You can write to us at [email protected] or follow SUBJECT in Facebook, Twitter, instagram or subscribe here to our bulletin.
Limited time special offer
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#daughter #sheep #shepherd #embroiderer #pools #win #Nobel #Prize