Season of Nobel Prize-- 2017- Part- I
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Dr. A. K. Srivastava, October 04, 2017.
Come first week of October every year and the world looks anxiously about the announcement of various Nobel Prizes. This year also till Wednesday : October 04, 2017, prizes in Medicine or Physiology, Physics and Chemistry have been announced and balance in Literature, Peace and in Economics shall be made on 5th, 6th and 9th October respectively.
The Nobel Prize is a set of annual international awards bestowed, in the memory of Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel ,in the fields of Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace and in Economic Sciences by Swedish and Norwegian institutions in recognition of academic, cultural or scientific advances. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awards the Nobel Prizes in Physics , in Chemistry and in Economics ( funded by Sveriges Riksbank) , in Physiology or Medicine by the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet ; in Literature by the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded not by a Swedish organization but by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
The prizes are given in . Each recipient, or laureate, receives a gold medal, a diploma, and a sum of money that has been decided by the Nobel Foundation. (As of 2017, each prize was worth SEK 9,000,000 or about US$1,110,000). The Medals is made of 18 carat green god with 24 carat gold coating. Between 1901 and 2016, the Nobel Prizes and the Prize in Economic Sciences were awarded to 911 people and organizations. With some receiving the Nobel Prize more than once, this makes a total of 23 organizations, and 881 individuals. Out of this list 12 are Indians (5 Indian citizens and 7 of Indian origin or residency). Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian citizen to be awarded and Mother Teresa is the only woman in the list. Notably, Sri Aurobindo was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1943 and for the Nobel Prize in Peace in 1950.Father of the Nation M. K. Gandhi was nominated for the Peace Prize thrice (in 1937–39, 1947), but never got it.
2017 : Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology
The 2017 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly on Monday , October 02, to three Americans for discoveries about the molecular mechanisms controlling the body’s circadian rhythm-- the body's Biological clock. All organisms, including humans, operate on 24-hour rhythms that control not only sleep and wakefulness but also physiology generally, including blood pressure and heart rate, alertness, mood swing, body temperature and reaction time.
Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young used fruit flies to isolate a gene that controls the rhythm of a living organism’s daily life. Dr. Hall, Dr. Rosbash and Dr. Young were “able to peek inside our biological clock,” helping “explain how plants, animals and humans adapt their biological rhythm so that it is synchronized with the Earth’s revolutions,” the Nobel Prize committee said.
In 1984, the scientists isolated the 'Period gene' and discovered that cells use it to make a protein, called PER, that builds up at night, during sleep. In daytime, the protein degrades in accordance with the insects’ sleep-wake cycle. As PER was broken down in daytime, the gene regained its function and worked again the next night, directing the synthesis of PER.
Jeffrey C. Hall received his doctorate in 1971 from the University of Washington. He joined the faculty at Brandeis University in 1974 and is now a professor emeritus of biology.
Michael Rosbash received his doctorate in 1970 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1974, he has been on the faculty at Brandeis University, where he is a professor of biology and holds an endowed chair in neuroscience.
Michael W. Young received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in 1975. He is a professor of genetics at Rockefeller University in New York.
2017 : Nobel Prize in Physics
Three American scientists have won the 2017 Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday October 03. Prof. Rainer Weiss, 85,a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kip Thorne ,77,and Barry Barish, 81, both of the California Institute of Technology, were awarded for the discovery of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago but had never been directly seen.
Dr. Weiss will receive half of the prize of 9 million Swedish Krona, or more than $1.1 million, and Dr. Thorne and Dr. Barish will split the other half.
"Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, two massive black holes engaged in a deadly dance. They revolved around each other, spiraling faster and faster until they were whirling at half the velocity of light when they collided and merged, forming an even massive black hole," began Olga Botner, a member of the panel announcing the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2017 on Tuesday. It was awarded "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves". Gravitational waves Triggered , emanating from the collision of a pair of massive black holes a billion light years away when super-dense black holes merge. The waves were detected ,in February 2016, using laser beams at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
Scientists have estimated the work is a outcome of efforts of 1000 scientists, working for more than 40 years and costing about US $ 1 billion.
Many may not know. It is a proud moment for India also. Since the discovery paper has 39 Indian authors/scientists from nine institutions - CMI Chennai, ICTS-TIFR Bengaluru, IISER-Kolkata, IISER-Trivandrum, IIT Gandhinagar, IPR Gandhinagar, IUCAA Pune, RRCAT Indore and TIFR Mumbai, who are co-authors of this discovery paper. It was primarily funded through individual/ institutional grants by Government of India, Department of Atomic Energy, Department of Science & Technology and Ministry of Human Resource Development .
The group led by Bala Iyer (currently at ICTS-TIFR) at the Raman Research Institute in collaboration with scientists in France had pioneered the mathematical calculations used to model Gravitational Wave signals from orbiting black holes and neutron stars. Theoretical work that combined black holes and gravitational waves was published by C. V. Vishveshwara in 1970. These contributions are prominently cited in the discovery paper.
2017 : Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Three European-born scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday , October 04, for developing a new way to assemble precise three-dimensional images of biological molecules like proteins, DNA and RNA.
Their work has helped scientists decipher processes within cells that were previously invisible, and has led to better understanding of viruses like Zika. In the future, their techniques could offer road maps in the development of drugs to treat diseases.
The winners are Jacques Dubochet, 75, a retired biophysicist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland; Joachim Frank, 77, a professor at Columbia University in New York; and Richard Henderson, 72, a scientist at the British Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.
Dr. Dubochet is a Swiss citizen. He retired from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland in 2007. He is special as was suffering from dyslexia: “This permitted being bad at everything … and to understand those with difficulties.” Dr. Frank, was born in Germany and is now a citizen of the United States. Dr. Henderson, was born in Scotland and is a British citizen
The Nobel committee said the technique, Cryo -electron microscopy, produces “detailed images of life’s complex machineries in atomic resolution.”
“Soon there are no more secrets,” said Sara Snogerup Linse, a professor of physical chemistry at Lund University in Sweden who chaired the committee for the chemistry prize. “Now we can see the intricate details of the bio-molecules in every corner of our cells, in every drop of our body fluids.”
Season of Nobel Prize-- 2017-- Part II
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Dr. A. K. Srivastava , October, 09, 2017
In the previous part - I , of this blog post ,the answers to simple questions of What is Nobel Prize, Who, Why , How much, to Whom, What subject and in Which area the 2017's Awards were given, were briefly taken up. It is very obvious that many were left behind in the race and nobody talks about them, because 'Nobody can succeed the success'.
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When Saul bellow won the 1976 Literary Nobel Prize he remarked that " the child in me is delighted , the adult in me is skeptical ..... there was secret humiliation connected with the (Nobel)Prize (because) some of the very great writers of the century did not get it." Similarly the 2017 Literary Nobel Prize winner Mr. Ishiguro added that when he thinks of “all the great writers living at this time who haven’t won this prize, I feel slightly like an impostor.” Since the inception of Literature Nobel Prize was started in the year 1901 till now only 114 persons, including 14 women were decorated with the Prize. But, anybody and everybody would agree with me that the world have has many more bright stars in the galaxy of literati.
But , in the same go, it is important to know that who were the other contenders or what were the other areas on frontiers of human- knowledge, where the equally great persons of wisdom and grit were left but who were striving hard to expose open the secrets of human body & mind, aspirations & behavior, tit bits of nature and how it is going to benefit the humanity in general.?
While the Nobel committee does not share the list of those under consideration, leading up to the awards, there is usually a long list of names mentioned by analysts of those who may receive the award for their work. One speculator in particular, named David Pendlebury, is known for making predictions based on extensive data analysis. He is right most of the time. For the 2017 Medicine prize, Pendlebury put the couple : Drs. Yuan Chang ,57, a Taiwan born Chinese-American and American Patrick Moore, 60, on the list of serious contenders. The husband and wife Scientists' team , who discovered tumor viruses called Herpesvirus 8 and MCV which can lead to cancer were serious contenders.
The New York Times reported their own list. The list includes other groundbreaking discoveries in the fields to harness the body’s immune system to fight cancer, a gene-editing system and discoveries in new genes that predispose to cancer and who found drugs that is home in on cancer-causing mutations. The list of names of scientists is big like..... Dr. James P. Allison of the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Gordon J. Freeman of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Dr. Arlene Sharpe of Harvard Medical School; for gene editing- - four scientists : Dr Jannifer A Daudna, University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier, Max Planck Institute of Biology ,Berlin, Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute and George Church of Harvard.(They have been involved in a high-profile dispute over patent rights; in any event, the Nobel can be shared by a maximum of three scientists.).
Forecasters like Clarivate has put forward US chemists John Bercaw and Robert Bergman alongside Russian researcher Georgiy Shul’pin for the 109th Nobel Chemistry prize for critical contributions to C–H functionalization , a widely used type of reaction that replaces carbon–hydrogen with carbon–carbon or other bonds. Chemical engineer Jens Nørskov from Stanford University, US, is another possible for the Chemistry prize for his fundamental work on heterogeneous catalysis, which has led to advances in ammonia synthesis and fuel cells. Others put forward Tsutomu Miyasaka from Japan, Nam-Gyu Park from South Korea and Henry Snaith from the UK, who they suggest might be honored for the discovery of Perovskites and their use in solar cells.
Dr. Raghuram Rajan, former Governor of Reserve Bank of India (RBI), has been named one of the possible contenders for 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics for his "contributions illuminating the dimensions of decisions in corporate finance", suggests Clarivate Analytics. He is one of the six economists on the list of probable winners compiled by Clarivate Analytics. For Peace Prize this year many may be surprised finding the names of world leaders like Mr. Puttin, Russian President and US President Mr. Donald J Trump.
2017 : Nobel Prize in Literature
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2017 was awarded to Mr. Kazuo Ishiguro, 62, a Japan born British writer. He is the 29th English language novelist, who won the prize.
Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy described Mr. Ishiguro ....“If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell, but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix,” . She further described him . “ He is a writer of great integrity..... He has developed an aesthetic universe all his own, who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world...."
Born in 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan, the son of an oceanographer, Mr. Ishiguro moved to Surrey, England, when he was 5 years old, and attended Woking County Grammar School, a school that he told The Guardian was “probably the last chance to get a flavor of a bygone English society that was already rapidly fading.” His childhood ambition was to be a song writer and a singer, who he tried many years and misery failed. After studying English and philosophy at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, he spent a year writing fiction, eventually gaining a Master of Arts in creative writing, and studied with writers like Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter.
Though a writer is never judged for the Nobel Prize based on a single piece of work, but for the whole mass and length of his literary-journey, Mr. Ishiguaro' s journey span of 35 years have very many interesting curves. He gained his wide recognition from his third novel " The remains of the day", which won the Booker Prize and was the theme of a successful Hollywood film, starring Anthony Hopkins, depicting the life a buttoned-up butler.
2017 : Nobel Prize in Peace
International Campaign To Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) , a nuclear disarmament group has won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its decade-long campaign to get rid the world of the atomic bombs.
Founded in Vienna in 2007 on the fringes of an international conference on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the Geneva-based ICAN has tirelessly mobilized campaigners and celebrities alike in its cause. It is ironic that ICAN was a key player in the adoption of a historic Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty ( NBT), signed by 122 countries ,however, the accord was largely symbolic, as none of the nine known world nuclear powers signed up to it.
Norway's Nobel committee president Berit Reiss-Andersen said "The organization is receiving the award for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons."
As nuclear-fuelled crises swirl over North Korea and Iran, the International Campaign To Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was awarded the honor on Friday. Beatrice Fihn, the leader of the grassroots ICAN organization, was "delighted" with the prize, adding that US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un should "know that nuclear weapons are illegal".
2017 : Nobel Prize in Economics Sciences.
American Economist Professor Richard H. Thaler, 72, from University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business , was awarded the 2017-- Nobel Prize in Economic Science, on Monday, the 9th October, for his contributions to Behavioral Economics.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences declared his "contributions have built a bridge between the economic and psychological analyses of individual decision-making. His empirical findings and theoretical insights have been instrumental in creating the new and rapidly expanding field of behavioral economics".
Professor Thaler said that the basic premise of his theories was that, “In order to do good economics you have to keep in mind that people are human.” He explains, for example, why an umbrella store may not raise prices during a rainstorm. Professor Thaler has played a central role in pushing economists to the simple argument that humans are sometimes irrational, which is obvious but also unhelpful. Rather, he showed that people depart from rationality in consistent ways, so their behavior can still be anticipated.
“Thaler more than anyone has disciplined the idea of animal spirits,” said Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor who is another of Professor Thaler’s frequent collaborators. The two men wrote a best-selling 2008 book, “Nudge,” which argued that behavioral economics could be applied to public policy, improving lives at little cost. One of Mr. Thaler’s frequent collaborators, Israeli Psychologist from Princeton University Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Economics Nobel Prize in 2002.
I congratulate all the 2017 Nobel Prize Winners for their huge contributions for the cause of humanity in general and for advancing their respective disciplines in particular.
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