2017 Nobel Prize Winners

The 2017 Nobel Prizes were recently awarded in early October. Annual Nobel Prizes are awarded for achievement in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine, Economics, Literature, and Peace.

Physics

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded as one half to Rainer Weiss and the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”. This was a very short turnaround for this discovery receiving the Nobel Prize, as the original observation of gravitational waves occurred only two years earlier in September 2015. The award winning discovery utilized the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), the name for the internationally collaborative project involving two disparate wave detectors located over 1,800 miles apart. Gravitational waves were predicted to exist by Albert Einstein, produced by the acceleration of any mass, however they were previously impossible to directly observe or detect. The gravity waves discovered originated from two colliding black holes 1.3 billion light years away, producing the massive release of gravity waves necessary for detection. A description of how the LIGO observatories detect gravity waves is shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: How to catch a gravitational wave. Source: www.nobelprize.org.

Physiology/Medicine

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young “for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm”. The circadian rhythm is the internal, biological clock that regulates the daily cycles of humans, animals, and most if not all other organisms. Biological processes regulated by the circadian rhythm include sleep in animals and the opening/closing of pores in plant leaves. During the 1970s, the Nobel laureates isolated genes and their protein products in fruit flies found to be responsible for daily circadian cycles. They found that the proteins are self-regulating in a negative feedback loop (Figure 2) – as increased gene expression causes buildup of the protein product, the protein inhibits further expression. As the protein naturally degrades, expression of its gene is increased to renew the cycle. The period gene and its protein product PER was the first circadian gene identified, but other important regulators of its specific timing were later discovered as well.

Figure 2: The PER protein in fruit flies inhibits expression of its gene, period, in a cyclical manner. Other proteins help regulate the 24-hour cycle of this process in order to control daily biological cycles. Source: www.nobelprize.org.

Chemistry

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, and Richard Henderson “for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution”. This technology allows observation of interacting biological molecules at atomic resolution. Through a series of breakthroughs from 1975 through 1990, it improved upon traditional electron microscopy, which has fine resolution but did not previously allow observation of living molecules or three-dimensional images. Joachim Frank based on work achieved from the 1970s through 1980s developed a method using computer modeling to produce three-dimensional images from two-dimensional electron microscopy images. Around the same time, Dubochet created “vitrified water” – water supercooled into a liquid glass state – in order to visualize water-soluble biomolecules in a native state. Meanwhile, Henderson was pioneering vast improvements in electron microscopy resolution beginning during the same period and continuing through the early 1990s. These breakthroughs along with further perfections in the decades since have allowed the dream of high resolution, three-dimensional images of almost any kind of biomolecule to become reality.

Figure 3: (left) Frank’s methodology of creating 3D images; (right) Dubochet imaging viruses in vitrified water. Source: www.nobelprize.org.

Other Prizes

The other original Nobel Prizes are for Literature and Peace. Additionally, the prize in Economic Sciences was added in 1969 and is officially known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world". Ishiguro has written eight books since 1982 as well as several TV and movie scripts.

The Peace Prize was awarded not to an individual but to an organization, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). From the Nobel Prize website: “ICAN is a coalition of non-governmental organizations from around 100 different countries around the globe. The coalition has been a driving force in prevailing upon the world's nations to pledge to cooperate with all relevant stakeholders in efforts to stigmatise, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons. To date, 127 states have made such a commitment, known as the Humanitarian Pledge.”

The winner for economics was Richard H Thaler “for his contributions to behavioral economics.” Thaler’s career investigated the psychology of individual economic decision making, creating theories and models for the sometimes irrational thought processes that we all exhibit. His research has been used as a basis in attempts to improve human behavior.