The Nobel Prize. The highest award for academic excellence is the top achievement of anyone in the fields honored by the prize. According to the last will and testament of Alfred Nobel, the five prizes are awarded to “those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind,” the individuals, and teams who distinguish themselves to the extent that they are considered for a prize are at the pinnacle of their perspective fields, this year’s laureates are no exception.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicines was awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, a duo of researchers both affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. They were awarded the prize for “discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19,” Karikó and Weissman have been working together since the early 1990s, and their breakthrough discovery in 2005, which showed that replacing uridine with pseudouridine renders the mRNA nonimmunogenic. This research was instrumental in developing mRNA vaccines that saved millions of lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For the Nobel Prize in the field of Physics, Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier were awarded “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter,” the laureate’s experiments produced very short pulses of light that were measured in attoseconds, to put this into further context according to the National Science Foundation “For comparison, an attosecond is to a second what a second is to about 31.71 billion years,” this discovery enables scientists to research anomalies previously impossible to study because of their incredible speed.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus, and Alexei Ekimov for their Discovery and synthesis of quantum dots, which are semiconductor particles only a few nanometres in size. Quantum Dots can be used in technologies to tune the colors of LED lights, improve the picture of TV screens, and have clinical applications as well.
The prize in literature has been awarded to Norwegian author Jon Fosse for “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable,” his most notable works include “Septology”, “Aliss at the Fire”, and his upcoming novel “A Shining”. Fosse has been published since 1983, with his first novel “Raudt, svart” which he wrote as a young man studying at the University of Bergen. Fosse works. Fosse has been translated into fifty languages, and his works have sold thousands of copies. Fosses’ works focus on the innate human insecurity and anxiety that is evident throughout his works.
Narges Mohammadi, the human rights activist currently incarcerated in Iran has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all,” Mohammadi has been imprisoned in the infamous Evin prison in Tehran. Though she has not been heard from since the award was announced, in an audio recording from inside the prison Mohammadi can be hard leading the chant “Woman, life, freedom!” a chant that became the slogan of the movement after the death of a young woman who died in the custody of the morality police after being arrested for not wearing her headscarf properly. Mohamaddi has two teenage children and a husband who live in Paris.
