The Nobel Week has ended. The winners of the economics prize will be announced on Monday, but, as you know, it was not mentioned in the will of Alfred Nobel, but only bears his name, being established by the Swedish State Bank. Therefore, we can summarize the main nominations.
Physiology and Medicine Award
Our ability to feel heat, cold and touch is the basis of human interaction with the outside world and, moreover, is necessary for us to survive.In everyday life, we take these sensations for granted, but scientists were interested to find out how nerve impulses are excited, which allow us to feel the temperature and mechanical effects on the skin. This question was decided by the laureates of this year’s Nobel Prize.
David Julius was born in New York, worked at the University of California. Ardem Pataputyan He was born in Lebanon, but later moved to the USA.The award was given to them for the discovery of temperature and touch receptors.Before their discoveries, it was not completely clear how these external stimuli turn into electrical impulses of our nervous system.
David Julius is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. Photo: Reuters
In the second half of the 1990s, David Julius analyzed the effect on the receptors of capsaicin, which is contained in chili peppers and causes a burning sensation that we experience.After painstaking searches, a single gene capable of making cells sensitive to capsaicin was found. His colleague Ardem Pataputyan studied how the skin reacts to pressure. With his collaborators, he identified a line of cells that emitted an electrical signal when individual cells were pierced with a micropipette.Both researchers were able to discover missing links in our understanding of the interaction between human sensory organs and the environment.
“Both laureates, both David Julius and Ardem Pataputyan, have made a big leap in receptor research. They applied the most modern methods to study their molecular structure and, most importantly, their control mechanisms,” says Scientific Director of the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Biological Sciences Pavel Balaban. — What can this scientific work give? In pathology, it is desirable to be able to control human receptors directly. Knowing the mechanisms discovered by scientists, it is possible to stop pain not with such harsh means as modern anesthetics (they lead to the shutdown of many central mechanisms, therefore they are sometimes contraindicated), but with softer ones. This fundamental knowledge will open up new opportunities for medicine.
The discovery of Julius and Pataputyan can form the basis of promising developments in the field of rehabilitation medicine, rehabilitation therapy and neurobionic prostheses. Their results will also be useful when developing measures in the field of adaptive medicine, for example, in extreme conditions of the Arctic or Antarctic.
Professor Ardem Pataputyan from the Department of Neurobiology of Scripps Research. Photo: Reuters
Physics Prize
The award in this category was awarded “for an innovative contribution to our understanding of complex physical systems”. The winners were Japanese climatologistsHukuro Manabe, who lives in the USA, German oceanologistKlaus Hasselman and theoretical physicist from Italy Giorgio Parisi. All of them at one time received results that now help to solve complex problems, for example, related to the assessment of the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the Earth’s climate.In general, the research of these scientists is devoted to chaotic and random processes in complex systems. And the climate is just like that: it is influenced by many factors.
In the 1960s, Shukuro Manabe led the development of physical models of global climate and was the first to investigate the interaction between radiation balance and vertical transport of air masses.Later, Klaus Hasselman created a model that links weather and climate together.This made it possible to understand why climate models can be reliable, despite the fact that the weather is changeable and chaotic.His methods have also been used to prove the link between global warming and rising carbon dioxide emissions.
Italian Giorgio Parisi discovered hidden patterns in materials with disordered structure in 1980. “His discoveries are among the most important in the theory of complex systems. They allow us to understand and describe many different and obviously completely random phenomena not only in physics, but also in other very different fields, such as mathematics, biology, neuroscience and machine learning,” the Nobel Committee website says.
Scientific Director of the laboratory “Modeling and development of new materials” of NUST “MISIS”, Academician of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Igor AbrikosovHe considers the works of Nobel laureates in physics very important: “Their results obtained in the 1960s and 1970s affect our understanding of what is happening now. Climate modeling itself is a very difficult task. The question of what climate change depends on has been of interest to mankind for a long time. It was only with the advent of computers that it was possible to build models clarifying the effect of greenhouse gases on the climate. It was done by sHukuro Manabe. And Klaus Hasselman was able to show the influence of the human factor on the temperature increase.
Nevertheless, questions about the choice of the Nobel Committee remain.There are many sections and directions in modern physics, and in some of them the most important discoveries have been made, which have been waiting for their evaluation by Swedish academics for more than a decade. Every year they face a difficult task: how to choose from such a large number of applicants? But this time they choose a direction that is notIt relates to physics directly, but exists at the intersection of sciences, but (and it’s hard to argue with this) it correlates very well with the international political agenda. After all, the topic of climate change is now constantly appearing at summits and negotiations of the highest level, and “green” energy, zero carbon balance and environmental transformation have become the mainstream of the world economy.
And it would be fine if the conclusions obtained by the laureates were indisputable and well-confirmed (usually the Nobel Prize is given for such works), but in this case this is not observed. There is no complete consensus in the scientific community on aspects of climate change, although the overwhelming majority of researchers supportthe views expressed in the UN reports (the last of them directly points to man as the culprit of climate change). One of the arguments of skeptics just concerns the connection of warming with the growth of carbon dioxide emissions:Perhaps, as they note, the increase in the concentration of CO2 is not the cause of global warming, but its consequence.
“I am very much surprised why they have now decided to give the Nobel Prize for this research. On the one hand, this is super important, because it concerns global warming, whether we are threatened by a greenhouse catastrophe or not. On the other hand, the situation in this area is far from clear, — stated in interview with RBC leading researcher of the Moscow State University Research Institute, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Alexander Panov.
Chemistry Prize
Since school, we remember that catalysts are substances that accelerate a chemical reaction, but do not participate in it themselves.The winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry were the German Benjamin List and an American of British origin. David Macmillan. They have developed the process of asymmetric organocatalysis.Their works were published in 2000 virtually simultaneously.”This had a great impact on pharmaceutical research and made chemistry more environmentally friendly,” the Nobel Committee communique says.
Two types of catalysts were previously known: enzymes and metals. Benjamin List and David Macmillan discovered the third type of catalysis: using amino acids and other organic substances. Liszt drew attention to the fact that metal atoms are present in a significant part of the enzymes, but some of them trigger chemical reactions without their help. He suggested that amino acids could be made catalysts by isolating them from enzyme molecules, and then proved this empirically. David Macmillan came to the same idea in a different way.
The discovery of scientists has long been used in agrochemistry and pharmaceuticals, for example, in the production of cleaner antibiotics and other medicines without side effects. In general, thanks to their method, the production of artificial chemical compounds has become easier. This is the case when the Nobel Prize is given for work that has an applied application.
“It’s sometimes quite difficult to explain to people not related to chemistry what we and other chemists do,” David McMillan said at a press conference urgently organized by Princeton University, where he works. I’ll just say that everything we do has a direct impact on everyday life. It’s incredibly exciting: what you do on Tuesday can have practical consequences as early as Friday.
Literature Prize
The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was a Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurna. He was awarded the award “for his uncompromising and compassionate study of the consequences of colonialism and the fate of a refugee in the abyss between cultures and continents”.
Gurna was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar in a Muslim family of Arab origin. At the age of 20, he moved to the UK, where he defended his doctorate and lives to this day, teaching literature at the University of Kent. He became a writer in 1987. In total, Abdulrazak Gurna has ten books on his account, the most famous of which are;”Paradise” and “BY the Sea” were included in the Booker Prize lists. In addition, he published research articles on postcolonial writers, which also did not go unnoticed by the Nobel Committee. The fight against the colonial heritage of mankind (more precisely, the developed countries of the world) is another trend of modern politics.
Peace Prize
Finally, on Friday, October 8, the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize were announced. They became Filipina Maria Ressaand a RussianDmitry Muratov.As stated in the communique, “for their efforts to protect freedom of expression, which is a prerequisite for democracy and lasting peace.”
Ressa is a journalist and co-founder of the Rappler news outlet in the Philippines. She has been working as a reporter in Southeast Asia for more than 20 years and, according to the Nobel Committee, “uses freedom of speech to expose abuse of power, violence and growing authoritarianism in her home country, the Philippines.”
Dmitry Muratov in 1993 became one of the founders of the “New Newspaper”, and since 1995 its editor-in-chief. According to the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee (the laureates of the Peace Prize are traditionally announced in Oslo) Berit Reiss-Andersen, For decades, he has defended freedom of speech in Russia in increasingly difficult conditions. “There is no democracy without freedom of speech,” Ms. Reiss-Andersen emphasized.
Of course, the Peace Prize is the most politicized of all the Nobel Prizes. Even if we leave aside the arguments about why those making this choice consider themselves entitled to transfer the ideas of freedom of speech accepted in the West to other countries, there are still some questions. Firstly, why was WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange not included in the number of laureates? It is known that he is nominated for this award: he was nominated by the winner of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize Mairead Corrigan, which she herself reported to the press. She recalled that Assange was fulfilling his duty as a publisher, revealing, for example, facts about war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. “He has shown examples of courage exposing the illegal actions of governments,” Corrigan said.
Maria Ressa. Photo: Reuters
Secondly, the will of Alfred Nobel on the Peace Prize states that this part of the award should be awarded “to the one who will make a significant contribution to the unity of peoples, the abolition of slavery, the reduction of the number of existing armies and the promotion of a peace agreement”. There is no talk of freedom of speech there, and, although in those years when Swedishthe entrepreneur wrote his will, such a concept did not exist in principle, now we understand perfectly well that in the conditions of information confrontation it can be interpreted as it suits you. Following the logic of the Nobel Committee, suffered the most from the harassment of freedom of speech over the past yearDonald Trump, who was simply blocked from his Twitter account after the election.
However, the peace Prize has long been criticized. The awarding of Barack Obama, when he was just elected president of the United States and had no merit yet, and the awarding of this award to the European Union also raised questions. It happened in 2012, when the Old World was in a state of crisis, both financial and ideological.
Why were Russian scientists deprived again?
Once again, there were no Russian researchers in the list of laureates in scientific nominations. It seems that this should no longer be surprising, but it is well known that our scientists are present among the applicants every year.
Nobel laureate, academician Vitaly Ginzburg He once told me that he was interested in this question: among physicists, the Nobel Committee sends about 2 thousand letters around the world, including about a hundred to Russian academics. All of them have the opportunity to mark their compatriot in the questionnaire. Our other laureate, the famous physicist Zhores Alferov he claimed that since the early 1950s, domestic researchers have been constantly among the nominees for this award, it’s just not disclosed.
It is clear that science is funded much better in the USA than in Russia, and the best minds from all over the world come there, which explains the largest number of Nobel laureates. But maybe it’s not just that?
“The Nobel prizes awarded for achievements in the field of natural sciences are quite objective and are always given to great scientists,” says the crystallographer and chemist, Professor of Skoltech Artem Oganov. On the other hand, a lot of great scientists, especially Soviet ones, were bypassed by this award, so we can say that to some extent it is politicized. It is difficult to say whether this is done consciously or not.
As you know, among the Nobel laureates of recent decades, most of all American scientists. This is quite natural. The fact is that the Nobel Committee sends out questionnaires for the nomination of candidates, including those who have already received this award. Imagine who will be nominated by the winners who have already taken place, while having US citizenship… With a much higher probability of other American scientists, because they know them better than others and communicate with them more often.