You can keep your Ballon d’Ors, your Grammys, even your Oscars. For scientists and science-lovers alike, the biggest week in the calendar is the announcement of the Nobel Prizes. The prizes, the legacy of Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, are awarded each year to those who have made “contributions that have conferred the greatest benefits to humankind.”
In the last week, six scientists from around the world received a phone call from Stockholm that transformed their lives. So, with a little help from some Edinburgh academics, let’s take a look at this year’s Nobel Prizes in Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry.
Medicine
First to be announced, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel from Germany, alongside American Karl Deisseroth, shared the prize in medicine for their work in pioneering the method of optogenetics.
The discovery began – as so many things do – with algae. Hegemann became fascinated with a species of algae which swims toward light. In 2002, Hegemann and Nagel discovered the protein channelrhodopsin. When the protein is exposed to blue light, a channel opens within it, creating an electrical impulse.
This property is fascinating enough on its own, but it was Deisseroth who developed the key breakthrough. He introduced the gene which creates channelrhodopsin into the nerve cells of living mice. This allowed scientists to use light to “switch on” parts of their brains – and so the field of optogenetics was born.
By individually controlling the nerve cells of the brain, scientists can determine which parts of the brain do what. This has applications ranging from diagnosing psychiatric disorders, to attempting to restore sight to those with visual impairments.
University of Edinburgh Professor Matthew Nolan told The Student that the discovery of optogenetics “immediately transformed investigation of almost all aspects of brain function. It’s underpinned a massive number of advances over the last two decades.”
And right here in Edinburgh, this technique is being used by many groups within the Institute for Neuroscience and Cardiovascular Research. Prof Nolan explained “my group and others in Edinburgh have used [optogenetics] to reveal mechanisms through which our brains remember.”
Physics
In the field of physics, the prize was awarded solely to Francis Halzen, a Belgian physicist who has spent the last 50 years as a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was awarded the prize for achievements in detecting neutrinos.
Neutrinos are quite literally everywhere. In fact, several hundred trillion have passed through your body since you began reading this sentence, mostly having come from space. The reason you were unaware is that the neutrino is incredibly unreactive.
Known as the “ghost particle,” it has no charge, a miniscule mass, and interacts with atoms incredibly rarely. This poses a great problem for physicists, with the man who hypothesised their existence in 1930, Wolfgang Pauli, writing “I have done a terrible thing. I have postulated a particle which cannot be detected.”
Halzen was the key mind behind the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, located at the south pole. Despite reacting very rarely, when neutrinos do, they release a flash of light. Halzen’s particular genius was to make use of a cubic kilometre of naturally occurring glacier ice. The ice’s transparency allows scientists to see these flashes, while its size allows them to detect as many reactions as possible.
Halzen’s idea started off as an unpopular shot in the dark, but after decades of tireless campaigning and fundraising, the IceCube Observatory opened in 2011. In the ensuing 15 years it has been behind a slew of new discoveries in neutrino research, and a global programme of similarly-designed detectors is now in the works.
This marks the first time since 1992 that the Nobel Committee awarded the prize to one individual. However in the press conference following the announcement, both the committee and Halzen emphasised that the IceCube Observatory was a massive, international collaboration, and that the award is on behalf of the hundreds of scientists who have worked on the project.
While the University of Edinburgh is not directly involved in the IceCube Observatory, it has a large and active neutrino research team. Neutrino physicists Pete Clarke, Cheryl Patrick, and Andrzej Szelc told The Student they were overjoyed that a fellow neutrino scientist had won the prize. They explained: “neutrino physics is a very interesting field to study, because it seems that at every step, the more we learn about them the more surprises we found. They are currently one of our best chances to find behaviours not predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics.”
They also spoke about the “bustling field of astroparticle physics.” From SuperNEMO and SBND, experiments which explore neutrinos from the sun and the fascinating properties of decay; to the BUTTON experiment, which “aims to understand how neutrinos could be used for nuclear reactor monitoring,” Edinburgh physicists are leaders in the field.
Chemistry
Lastly Henri Kagan from France and Kenso Soai from Japan won the prize for chemistry for the development of asymmetric synthesis and non-linear effects.
Most organic molecules have two variants: a left-handed version and a right-handed version, with the two being mirror images. However in nature, almost all biological molecules are left-handed. For a long time, the reason for such an imbalance was a mystery, as scientists thought chemical reactions could only produce equal amounts of left-handed and right-handed molecules.
That was up until Kagan discovered that in certain reactions, imbalances between the two can occur over time. This was followed by Soai’s landmark paper in 2003, where he created the first man-made chemical reaction with only left-handed molecules. Another key discovery of theirs is non-linear effects, which is where an unexpected imbalance in handedness is created, which doesn’t align with the handedness of the catalysts.
The Student spoke to Tabea and Louis, who are second and final year PhD students and part of the Lawrence research group. They spoke about the importance of non-linear effects in their research, and how “a deeper understanding of this can improve our ability to access highly enantioenriched [useful] material.” Observing these linear effects “is often very important information to a synthetic chemist, as it can lead to a change in reaction design.”
Thanks to the work of Kagan and Soai, scientists can effectively choose which orientation of molecule is produced. This is having widespread impacts, from creating new catalysts to speed up industrial processes, to drug development in the pharmaceutical industry.
Detracting from this year’s celebrations is the complete absence of women among the science laureates. This is a long-running issue for the Nobel Prizes: only 4 per cent of all laureates in the sciences have been woman. There is a global effort to close the gender gap in scientific research and education, and we know that seeing prominent female role models can be the silver bullet in encouraging women to study STEM. It’s clear the Nobel Committee needs to seriously think about how they acknowledge woman in the awarding of future prizes.
But for this year we can still celebrate the incredible achievements of these six scientists. In December they will travel to Stockholm to be presented with their medals. Glamorous banquets, lecture tours, and countless press interviews will follow. But beyond all this, these laureates – and their discoveries – will serve as inspiration to future generations.
Photo by Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg) via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
