Nobel Prizes 2023

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Nobel Prize in Medicine Awarded to Covid Vaccine Pioneers

 

Dr. Karikó, the daughter of a butcher, who had come to the United States from Hungary two decades earlier when her research program there ran out of money, was preoccupied by mRNA, which provides instructions to cells to make proteins. Defying the decades-old orthodoxy that mRNA was clinically unusable, she believed that it would spur medical innovations.

 

Dr. Karikó referred in an interview published by the University of Pennsylvania on Monday to her many years of clinging to the fringes of academia. In the interview, Dr. Karikó said that every October, her mother used to tell her, “I will listen to the radio that maybe you will get the Nobel Prize.” Dr. Karikó said she would answer: “Mum, you know, I never even get a grant.”

 

Kati Kariko Helped Shield the World From the Coronavirus

 

By all accounts intense and single-minded, Dr. Kariko lives for “the bench” — the spot in the lab where she works. She cares little for fame. “The bench is there, the science is good,” she shrugged in a recent interview. “Who cares?”

 

For Dr. Kariko, most every day was a day in the lab. “You are not going to work — you are going to have fun,” her husband, Bela Francia, manager of an apartment complex, used to tell her as she dashed back to the office on evenings and weekends. He once calculated that her endless workdays meant she was earning about a dollar an hour.

 

She could make mRNA morecules that instructed cells in petri dishes to make the protein of her choice. But the mRNA did not work in living mice.

 

A control in an experiment finally provided a clue. Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman noticed their mRNA caused an immune overreaction. But the control molecules, another form of RNA in the human body — so-called transfer RNA, or tRNA — did not.

 

A molecule called pseudouridine in tRNA allowed it to evade the immune response. As it turned out, naturally occurring human mRNA also contains the molecule.

 

The idea that adding pseudouridine to mRNA protected it from the body’s immune system was a basic scientific discovery with a wide range of thrilling applications. It meant that mRNA could be used to alter the functions of cells without prompting an immune system attack.

 

 

Katalin Kariko at her home in Jenkintown, Pa., in February. (사진: 위 기사에서)

 

 

 

Nobel Prize in Physics

 

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier on Tuesday for techniques that illuminate the subatomic realm of electrons, providing a new perspective into a previously unexplored domain.

 

Electrons move at a whopping 43 miles a second. This speed has long made them impossible to study. The new experimental techniques created by the three scientist-laureates use short light pulses to capture an electron’s movement at a single moment in time.

 

 

 

Nobel Prize in Chemistry

 

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov for being pioneers of the nanoworld. The new laureates discovered and developed quantum dots, semiconductors made of particles squeezed so small that their electrons barely have room to breathe.

 

Scientists have known since the 1930s that squeezing atoms into a tiny enough “container” could increase the frequency of their electrons and change the type of light the material absorbs or emits. That container is a crystal, called a quantum dot because it triggers the wavelike behavior theorized by quantum mechanics.

 

Quantum dots are now used to tune the colors in LED lights and improve the brilliance of television screens. They can also be used as fluorescent imaging tools in biomedical applications, such as identifying cancerous tissue. Quantum dots are expected to lead to advances in electronics, solar cells and encrypted quantum information.

 

 

 

Fosse Receives the Nobel Prize in Literature

 

Jon Fosse's Books Seek and Find the Devine

 

If experiencing all of that in a single sentence that runs across hundreds of pages is a daunting entry point, I bring you tidings of great joy: “A Shining,” which will be published on Oct. 31, is only 75 pages long and made up of short, simple sentences; it’s also, somehow, a luminous and subtle rewriting of the entire Divine Comedy. Told in the first person, the novel is about a lost-feeling man who decides to drive his car into a secluded forest in deep winter, just as Dante’s poem opens with the poet finding himself lost in a dark wood, in the middle of the universal journey of life. Feeling cold from more than just the weather, Fosse’s protagonist ventures out into the ever-darkening woods, drawn by an obscure but light-filled presence:

Now it’s really as dark as it can get and there in front of me I see the outline of something that looks like a person. A shining outline, getting clearer and clearer. Yes, a white outline there in the dark, right in front of me. Is it far away or is it nearby. I can’t say for sure. It’s impossible, yes, impossible to say whether it’s close or far away. But it’s there. A white outline. Shining. And I think it’s walking toward me. Or coming toward me. Because it’s not walking. It’s just getting closer and closer somehow. And the outline is entirely white. Now I see it clearly. Yes, I see that it’s white. A whiteness. It’s so clear in the black darkness.

Fosse is our age’s great writer of light and darkness. His characters reckon with the real presence of God in their lives and in the world, both of which, if God didn’t exist, would amount to a total void. As “A Shining” develops, this presence remains close but is never named; elsewhere, it is joined by other shapes that the man eventually discerns as his parents. They have come into the woods to search for their lost son, calling for him and asking him to come close so they can help bring him to a better place — Fosse’s variation on Beatrice and Virgil guiding the lost Dante to God and heaven.