The Nobel Prizes for Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace were established in Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel’s last will, signed on 27 November 1895, and an additional prize for the Economic Sciences was established later by the central bank of Sweden, Sveriges Riksbank, in 1968. Every year, the Nobel Prizes are awarded “to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.”
In 2020, these prizes were awarded to eleven individuals and one organisation in recognition of their contributions to science, art, and world peace. Sadly, it is often difficult for non-specialists to understand just how significant these contributions are. To give some perspective to these achievements, The Diacritic’s Qian Zilan spoke to professors from Yale-NUS College and the National University of Singapore for their thoughts on this year’s prizes.
Medicine
Awardees: Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton, and Charles M. Rice
Discovery of the Hepatitis C Virus
By: Dr. Tan Yee Joo, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine [mfn referencenumber=Profile]Dr. Tan Yee Joo’s laboratory does research on the Hepatitis B virus (HBV) and Hepatitis C virus (HCV), the two major players which cause chronic liver diseases worldwide. Dr. Tan Yee Joo also has various publications about the Hepatitis C Virus in particular. More information about Dr. Tan Yee Joo can be found here.[/mfn]
For their outstanding contributions to the discovery of hepatitis C virus (HCV), a positive-sense single-stranded RNA virus that specifically infects the liver, Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton, and Charles M. Rice were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. HCV infects the liver and frequently causes a chronic infection which can lead to severe diseases including liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma.
Prior to the discovery of HCV, hepatitis A and B viruses have been identified. However, Harvey J. Alter found that another virus was causing chronic hepatitis, known then as non-A, non-B hepatitis, in a significant number of patients given blood transfusions. However, numerous attempts to isolate this virus were unsuccessful until Michael Houghton used techniques from molecular biology to obtain the sequence of the virus and named it HCV. Subsequently, Charles M. Rice pioneered novel methods for growing HCV, used a humanized mouse model to study the replication of HCV, and demonstrated its ability to cause liver diseases.
The discovery of HCV led to the development of reliable diagnostic tests that allow for the safe use of blood products, which are of high medical importance. Its discovery also led to intensive research resulting in the development of highly efficacious anti-viral drugs. Over 90% of patients diagnosed with hepatitis C are responsive to these drugs and can be cured of the virus infection. There is also much research to develop a vaccine for HCV, and there is hope that HCV can be eradicated from the world.
Physics
Awardees: Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez, and Reinhard Genzel
Discoveries on Black Holes
By: Dr. Chelsea E. Sharon, Yale-NUS College [mfn referencenumber=Profile]Dr. Chelsea E. Sharon currently teaches the module Introduction to Black Holes in Yale-NUS College, in which she and her students analysed some of the Nobel-winning data in the class. Dr. Chelsea E. Sharon herself actually collaborated with one of the Nobel Prize winners. More information about Dr. Chelsea E. Sharon can be found here.[/mfn]
The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez, and Reinhard Genzel for their work on black holes. Black holes are sufficiently dense compact objects whose gravitational pull is so strong that nothing—not even light itself—can escape from it. (If you get too close, that is.) Given such exotic properties, physicists have long sought to understand black holes’ nature and effects on their surroundings, while astronomers have sought to discover and characterize black holes in nature.
Sir Roger Penrose has made significant theoretical contributions to cosmology, which is the study of the Universe as a whole, and general relativity, which is the geometric theory that ties gravity to the structure of space and time. His half of the 2020 Nobel Prize was for “the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity,” essentially honouring his lifetime of contributions in this area.
The second half was split between Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel who led two competing teams using some of the biggest optical telescopes in the world to observe infrared emission from stars near the galactic center. By characterizing those stars’ changing positions over many years, their teams were able to robustly determine that the stars are orbiting a black hole (as it emits no light of its own) millions of times more massive than our Sun. While their conclusions have been widely accepted by the scientific community for years given the consensus between the two competing teams, the somewhat conservative Nobel Prize Committee appears to have waited until there was sufficient broad supporting evidence for black holes’ existence before awarding the prize.
The Physics Nobel Prize Committee has been generous to astronomy in recent years, with three of the last four prizes going to discoveries in the field of astrophysics. With last years’ announcement of the first spatially resolved picture of a black hole, astronomy and the study of black holes seems well-poised for more Nobel Prizes in the future.
Chemistry
Awardees: Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna
Discovery of a Method for Genome Editing
By: Qian Zilan and Wang Xing Hao, based on an interview with Dr. Antónia Monteiro, National University of Singapore and Yale-NUS College [mfn referencenumber=Profile]Dr. Antónia Monteiro seeks to understand the evolution of morphological novelties by focusing on the evolution and development of butterfly wing patterns. She published a paper about CRISPR/Cas9 technology in 2018. More information about Dr. Antónia Monteiro can be found here.[/mfn]
Fifty-eight years ago, a Nobel Prize was given for the discovery of the structure of DNA; in 2020, a Nobel Prize was given for the discovery of a method to change its base sequences in a targeted way. The prize in Chemistry was awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for their discovery of CRISPR/Cas9, a revolutionary new technology for gene editing.
CRISPR/Cas9 was adapted from a bacterial immune system that bacteria use to fight viruses. It is a natural system that has been re-engineered to allow researchers to cut DNA very precisely in a variety of different organisms, using a small piece of RNA complementary to the DNA sequence of the targeted gene.
Beyond genetic engineering, this discovery is monumental because it provides scientists with an extremely useful tool to better understand the relationship between genes and phenotypes. Many people in biology and biochemistry are trying to understand the connection between genes and phenotypes: how the phenotype—the physical expression of genes—is controlled at the genetic level. This connection is difficult to discern because genes and phenotypes do not always have a one-to-one correspondence; rather, many genes can be involved in one phenotype, and one gene can affect many phenotypes.
Hence, the best way to tease out the relationships between genes and phenotypes is to disrupt candidate genes to see if the disruption affects any morphological, behavioural, or physiological trait. Once scientists know the sequence of a gene and think that it may be involved in specifying one or more phenotypes, they try to disrupt the gene to test their hunch. While other methods of gene disruption existed before CRISPR/Ca9, this tool is easy to use and very efficient. As genes code for proteins, scientists use CRISPR/Cas9 to cut and damage genes in order to prevent the protein from forming. If an effect on the phenotype is observed due to the lack of this protein, it can then be concluded that the gene is important for the development of this phenotype. In other words, CRISPR/Cas9 enables scientists to make the fundamental connection between specific genes and specific traits in organisms.
Literature
Awardee: Louise Glück
Louise Glück’s Poetry of Disability
By: Dr. Kevin Daniel Goldstein, Yale-NUS College [mfn referencenumber=Profile]Dr. Kevin Daniel Goldstein’s research covers U.S. literature and disability studies. He also attended his B.A. in Sarah Lawrence College, where Louise Glück herself studied poetry in 1962. More information about Dr. Kevin Daniel Goldstein can be found here.[/mfn]
Of the 116 Nobel Laureates in Literature, Louise Glück is the 13th American and only the 16th woman. Over the course of a half-century literary career, her sparse, evocative poetry has represented myriad aspects of the human experience. As a scholar of disability, I find myself drawn to her representations of depression and anorexia.
Disability studies began with an elemental insight: bodily impairment is real, but it has no particular social meaning; it neither enables nor disables. Rather, disability is a product of how society organizes itself, inhering not in the body but in social formations, ideologies, political policies, and cultures which stigmatize physical and mental differences. Medical discourse performs a role in this operation, often monopolizing disability discourse and rendering disability a purely private concern. How often do we discuss disability outside of a medical context? We avoid the subject as if such speech could conjure its object. Disability is omnipresent, permeating our lives, and yet invisible; it is everywhere and nowhere.
Louise Glück’s lyric poems, with their solitary personae, seem at first to re-inscribe this construction, articulating a private experience of mental illness, and yet they call out to us; they find a way of representing the unrepresentable, creating a language for an experience that has no language. Her work makes the argument for the arts as a frame for contemplating disability: how the thinking, feeling subject of the poem experiences the complex relationship between impairment and disability.
Peace
Awardee: World Food Programme
Feeding the World
By: Dr. Marvin Joseph Fonacier Montefrio, Yale-NUS College [mfn referencenumber=Profile]Dr. Marvin Joseph Fonacier Montefrio’s broad research agenda explores the political ecology and cultural politics of historical and contemporary agrarian and food issues. His most recent research projects examine the cultural politics of sustainable food (organic food production, locavorism, agritourism, and urban agriculture) and the impacts of climate change on food security in Southeast Asia. More information about Dr. Marvin Joseph Fonacier Montefrio can be found here.[/mfn]
Every year, the announcement of the Nobel Prize generates some controversy, and the category that almost always raises contention is the Nobel Peace Prize. The level of controversy varies year to year, but some of the most contentious ones include Henry Kissinger (1973), Barack Obama (2009), and the European Union (2012). This year’s recipient—the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP)—did not generate as much controversy in mainstream media. (I mean, who would question the motives of the largest humanitarian multilateral initiative to address world hunger?) Indeed, WFP has delivered food aid to millions of people experiencing acute food insecurity and hunger across the globe, especially in “less developed” and conflict-ridden geographies. While WFP’s primary mandate is to alleviate hunger, the Norwegian Nobel Committee justified the award by underscoring the key role that food security plays in ensuring peace. Within the circle of critical food scholars, however, the award raises some controversy, not because WFP as an institution is seen as suspect—although certain scholars and pundits do make this argument—but because there remains a debate as to whether international food aid makes the lives of poor people better or worse.
Critical food and development scholars have raised concerns about the propensity of international food aid to create dependencies and distort domestic food markets in recipient countries, although others have attempted to refute this argument. Other scholars have underscored the politics associated with international food aid (see, for example, the works of Prof. Jennifer Clapp). Since the inception of the idea in the 1950s, donor countries have used international (especially bilateral) food aid as a political and economic instrument to influence recipient countries, but how WFP is embedded in such forms of politics remains a scholarly question. One thing is certain though: in more than five decades of international food aid history, food donor and distribution institutions (including WFP) needed to undergo several waves of reform to address political and policy issues. I write this short commentary not to provide an opinion as to whether WFP deserves the Nobel Peace Prize; I merely want to encourage curious readers in our community to explore the debates surrounding humanitarian food aid to help them arrive at their own conclusion. More importantly, I want our community to not uncritically accept this Nobel winning initiative as benign, as the issue of international food aid is quite complex.
Economics
Awardees: Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson
Improving Auctions
By: Dr. Francis Dennig, Yale-NUS College [mfn referencenumber=Profile]Dr. Francis Dennig is interested in policy questions relating to inequality and understanding determinants of economic inequality. He teaches the modules Intermediate Microeconomics, Public Economics, and Introduction to Game Theory in Yale-NUS College. More information about Dr. Francis Dennig can be found here.[/mfn]
This year the Sveriges Riksbank awarded its Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel jointly to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats.” Auctions, traditionally associated with the sale of art and antiques, are a way of selling a good to one of many interested buyers. They are favored in that context because, intuitively, the object will go to the buyer who values it most because they will bid the highest price. Since there is no true underlying value, just the prices bidders are willing to pay, this setting doesn’t require further analysis.
The laureates, both economic theorists at Stanford, started by studying the properties of simple theoretical auctions in which there is an objective value, but there is uncertainty about that value. Even in simple theoretical models, depending on the design, the seller might get less or the buyers might pay more than it is worth. In much messier real-world auctions (which the two economists later helped design), this has far-reaching consequences. For example, when governments (the seller) put radio spectrum on auction to telecom providers, they do so because they don’t yet know how much it is worth and want to get as much revenue as possible. The telecom companies (buyers) have a better idea of what it is worth and want to pay as little as possible, but the competition amongst bidders drives the price up, partly revealing the value to each other. Billions of dollars have been raised for governments in this way, and Professors Milgrom and Roberts’ contributions have been important in ensuring that the outcomes yielded maximum profits to society without burdening the winning bidders with such high costs that they would struggle to operate (and thus slow down the crucial expansion of telecoms infrastructure). Through such important applications, the research of this year’s laureates has had a material impact on society, making the prize thoroughly deserved.
Conclusion: A Brief History of the Nobel Prize
By: Wang Xing Hao
A prolific inventor in his own right, Alfred Nobel was most well-known in his day for his invention of dynamite. Eight years before his actual death, he was shocked to read his obituary in the news; it turns out that the French newspaper that published the obituary had confused the death of Alfred’s brother for the death of Alfred himself. What left the greatest impact on Alfred, however, was the obituary’s headline: “The merchant of death is dead.”
Wishing to leave a legacy beyond tools of destruction, he changed his will to bequeath 94% of his total assets to the establishment of the Nobel Prizes. When the will was read upon Alfred Nobel’s actual death in 1865, it so astonished the world that it took more than half a year for the will to be approved. The first Nobel Prizes were awarded on 10 December 1901, precisely five years after Alfred Nobel’s death, and they continue to be awarded every year on that exact date.
While they are now widely considered the most prestigious award in their individual fields, the Nobel Prizes are not without criticism. Given that modern scientific work is largely done in teams, the fact that a single Nobel Prize can only be awarded to a maximum of three individuals not only neglects the vital contributions of many scientists, it also perpetuates the pernicious myth that great science is done by lone “great men.”
Let us not forget the “men” part of that myth: women have been systematically passed over for the award. There have been numerous cases of Nobel Prizes being awarded to the men involved in important discoveries while omitting the female contributors. Examples include such luminaries as Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered the pulsar; Wu Chien-Shiung, who experimentally disproved the law of parity in quantum mechanics; and Rosalind Franklin, whose work was crucial to the discovery of the structure of DNA. Given that many of these women have now passed away, the stipulation that Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded posthumously means that these mistakes cannot be unmade. Thankfully, the fact that this years’ awardees include Andrea Ghez, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jennifer A. Doudna, and Louise Glück is a promising sign that these biases are on their way out.
It is impossible to know how Alfred Nobel’s legacy would have panned out if not for that fateful case of mistaken identity. Nonetheless, every year we are reminded of one who, by a final act of great generosity, gives due recognition to some of the finest thinkers and doers of our time.
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