The Nobel Prize

At the age of 23, before she’d even earned her PhD, Carol Greider made the discovery that would earn her the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Along with her supervisor and co-laureate Elizabeth Blackburn, she discovered the enzyme telomerase. At each end of a chromosome lies a protective “cap“ called a telomere – telomerase is the enzyme that creates it.

Read more about her work: https://bit.ly/43duLXx

“At school I had a teacher that didn't like me and I didn't like him. At the end of the year he decided to fail me. The ironic thing is that the topic was chemistry.

I have the distinction of being the only chemistry laureate who failed the topic in high school!“

- Tomas Lindahl, awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: https://bit.ly/2RdmSNe

Contracting tuberculosis at the age of 16 forced Tu Youyou to take two years out of school but encouraged her to pursue medicine. She turned to Chinese medicine to find a traditional cure for malaria.

“This experience led me to make a decision to choose medical research for my advanced education and career – if I could learn and have (medical) skills, I could not only keep myself healthy but also cure many other patients,” she said.

Tu Youyou searched in Chinese medical texts from the Zhou, Qing, and Han Dynasties to find a traditional cure for malaria, ultimately extracting a compound – artemisinin – that has saved millions of lives.

When she isolated the ingredient she believed would work, she volunteered to be the first human subject. She is the first mainland Chinese scientist to have received a Nobel Prize in a scientific category, and she did so without a doctorate, a medical degree, or training abroad.

Learn more about Tu Youyou’s work: https://lnkd.in/gkd_gcr

“My first chemistry exam at Harvard was a disaster,” says chemistry laureate Moungi Bawendi. Luckily, this experience did not stop him from following his passion.

Bawendi chose to study chemistry at university because he was good at it at school, but when faced with an exam in a “cavernous” and imposing building, he became overwhelmed, recalling an experience that many of us have faced.

“I knew what the questions were asking but I couldn’t answer them - at least I couldn’t answer them fast enough. I went to the first question and I got paralysed. I wrote a few things down and I panicked, and I went to the next question and panicked, and the next question and panicked and I looked around.”

His mark was the lowest in the class but for him it was a good lesson, because it made him learn how to study for a timed exam, describing it as “a skill that students need to learn.”

Bawendi shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Louis Brus and Aleksey Yekimov “for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots”.

Watch him talk about his childhood, the merits of diversity and research: https://lnkd.in/eSmiGJqu

Highlighting a special moment - we take a look at some of the amazing women who have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

Who do you recognise?

Video credit: NRK and SVT

“If you're not failing, you're not pushing boundaries.“

Hear medicine laureate Elizabeth Blackburn speak about the valuable lessons we can learn from failure.

#NobelPrize

Double Nobel Prize laureate Linus Pauling is the only person to have received two unshared Nobel Prizes.

Pauling was a chemist who lived on the frontiers of science. Working in the 1930s, he was among the pioneers who used quantum mechanics to understand and describe chemical bonding. His interests and contributions were many – he published the structure of the alpha helix, investigated sickle cell anaemia as the first molecular disease, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954.

After the bombing of Hiroshima, Pauling turned his attention to a different cause: peace. He campaigned vehemently against nuclear weapons and spearheaded a petition to ban nuclear testing. His efforts led to a second prize – the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize “for his fight against the nuclear arms race between East and West.“

Learn more about Linus Pauling: https://bit.ly/3k4g1n7

Who are the women that inspire you?

On the eve of #InternationalWomensDay we're highlighting some of the extraordinary women who changed the world. Join us tomorrow when we celebrate more remarkable women.

What made Albert Einstein tick?

Popular myths about the physics laureate’s brain are as enduring as his impact on our understanding of space, time and gravity.

Perhaps the most common of them is that Einstein had an unusually large brain, but this simply isn’t true.

After he died in 1955, Einstein’s brain was removed by a pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who preserved, photographed, and measured it. It weighed 1,230g, which is at the low end of average for modern humans.

However, further examination of photographs by a team at McMaster University, Canada, revealed that Einstein’s parietal lobes were 15% wider than average. While these lobes are implicated in mathematical, visual, and spatial cognition and it is intriguing to think they may help explain Einstein’s remarkable abilities, this link cannot be proved.

One thing we can be sure of is Einstein’s work ethic, curiosity and humility, which helped him achieve great things.

“We have been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly just how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists. If this humility could be imparted to everybody, the world of human endeavours would become more appealing,“ he said.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1921.

Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gpm6NQC

Fearlessness.

Hear chemistry laureate Frances Arnold share what she looks for in new recruits in her laboratory.

Watch the full interview with Arnold: https://bit.ly/3DWgPbU

#WomeninScience

“My wish is that this will provide a positive message specifically to the young girls who would like to follow the path of science, and to show them that women in science can also be awarded prizes. But, most importantly, that women in science can also have an impact through the research that they are performing.”

- 2020 chemistry laureate Emmanuelle Charpentier on her Nobel Prize.

Charpentier shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jennifer Doudna for discovering one of gene technology’s sharpest tools: the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors. Using these genetic scissors, researchers can edit the genome of practically all living things.

On the eve of International Day of Women and Girls in Science discover their story at nobelprize.org: https://bit.ly/33ID9RQ

#WomeninScience

2020 physics laureate Andrea Ghez: then and now.

Andrea Ghez's yearbook photo from 1983 was taken during her senior year at the University of Chicago Lab School. As a young girl, Ghez loved mathematics and all types of puzzles. She would grow up to become an astronomer proving that something massive, most likely a black hole, is lurking at the center of our Milky Way. In the second photo, she is pictured standing next to the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRC) at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

What do you hope to do when you're older?

#WomeninScience

“As I entered the room, Pierre Curie was standing in the recess of a French window opening on a balcony. He seemed to me very young, though he was at that time thirty-five years old. I was struck by the open expression of his face and by the slight suggestion of detachment in his whole attitude. His speech, rather slow and deliberate, his simplicity, and his smile, at once grave and youthful, inspired confidence.”

Marie Skłodowska Curie describes her first encounter with Pierre Curie in 1894, in the book 'Pierre Curie' which she wrote in 1924.

The couple married on 26 July 1895 and went on a biking tour for their honeymoon. They shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Henri Becquerel for research on radioactivity.

#ValentinesDay

Learn more about Marie and Pierre Curie and the discovery of polonium and radium: https://bit.ly/2zpCHZ1

The founder of fiber optics: Charles Kao

The rapid transmission of signals over long distances is fundamental to the flow of information in our time. Since the 1930s thin rods of glass have been used to see inside the body, but these were unusable for long-distance information transfer because too much light was lost along the way. In 1966, Charles Kao presented a solution: cladded fibers of very pure glass transported sufficient light. Together with laser technology, his solution made telecommunication using optical fibers possible.

Kao shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics “for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication.“

Learn more: https://bit.ly/2Oc7DEV

#WorldTelecommunicationDay

“If you want to contribute to humanity, the best thing you can do is become a teacher,” said chemistry laureate Dan Shechtman. He believes, “the most important resource of any country, and the most sustainable one, is human ingenuity. And we have to foster it, and we have to develop it as early as possible,” wise words that he has put into action by supporting quality science education from kindergarten age.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011 for the discovery of quasicrystals.

Learn more about Dan Shechtman: https://bit.ly/3hUI0oa

Did you know that eight parent-child pairs have been awarded a Nobel Prize?

Pictured is one of these pairs - father Arthur Kornberg (awarded the 1959 medicine prize) and his son Roger D. Kornberg (awarded the 2006 chemistry prize).

Here are the other parent-child pairs - only one of whom received the prize jointly for work they carried out together:

Marie Skłodowska (Physics 1903, Chemistry 1911) and Pierre Curie (Physics 1903)
Irène Joliot-Curie (Chemistry 1935)

J. J. Thomson (Physics 1906)
George Paget Thomson (Physics 1937)

William Bragg (Physics 1915)
Lawrence Bragg (Physics 1915)

Niels Bohr (Physics 1922)
Aage N. Bohr (Physics 1975)

Manne Siegbahn (Physics 1924)
Kai M. Siegbahn (Physics 1981)

Hans von Euler-Chelpin (Chemistry 1929)
Ulf von Euler (Medicine 1970)

Arthur Kornberg (Medicine 1959)
Roger D. Kornberg (Chemistry 2006)

Sune Bergström (Medicine 1982)
Svante Pääbo (Medicine 2022)

“In 10,000 years when this is all dried out, you can still resurrect the DNA in there and reconstruct this virus.”

In 2018, George Smith received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his technique called phage display, which uses bacteriophage – a virus that infects bacteria with its genes – to evolve new protein. This method has led to new pharmaceuticals.

Smith created his first phage display construct with natural phage from a bacteria virus and materials he received from 2015 chemistry laureate Paul Modrich. In this photograph, he is holding 0.5 ml liquid of the solution he used when he first applied the phage display method.

Read more about his life: https://bit.ly/49mue7x