Nobel Prize 2018 Announcements

[Orodruin]

The Nobel Prize winners of 2018 will be announced during the first week of October, starting with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday October 1.

As most of us are biased towards physics: The physics prize will be announced Tuesday October 2 @ 11.45 (Stockholm time - CEST) at the earliest.

The other announcement times are available on the official Nobel Prize homepage. All announcements are typically broadcast live on https://www.nobelprize.org/

Unlike last year, where the discovery of gravitational waves was the clear frontrunner (and also won the prize), there is no clear frontrunner for the physics prize. Anybody who dares to take a stab at speculating who will be the happy receiver of a phone call from the Royal Academy of Sciences on October 2? (Even if it is in the middle of the night if that person is based in America ...)

Edit: So let me start the speculation a bit. I think it is way past time to award the prize to a woman again. There are many women who have made important discoveries and it is unreasonable to ignore those accomplishments. I have long considered Lene Hau to be a frontrunner and she seems to appear on many science writers' wish lists as well.

 

[ZeGato]

Why should the scientist's sex have any influence on the decision? I know that Nobel prizes are somewhat meaningless given the amount of important work that is done over a year in any given area, but that would only make them even more meaningless, and with political connotations on top.

 

[Orodruin]

Why should the scientist's sex have any influence on the decision?

It shouldn't. Yet only two women have ever been awarded the physics prize despite there being a large number of women who have clearly made contributions that are Nobel Prize worthy. The last time was Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963, that is 55 years ago and 60 years after Marie Curie was awarded her prize. That's my point.

 

[gleem]

Another question is how old will the winner(s).be, will there be any new blood (<60)?. The average age of winners has been increasing slowly over the last sixty or seventy years

To continue from 2000 to 2017

number___ age group
1... < 40
4... ≤ 40 < 50
8 ... ≤50 < 60
12 ... ≤60 < 70
9 ... ≤70 < 80
10... ≥80

Only in 2001, 2010, 2011 where the recipients (8) totally less than 60. In 12 of those years the average age was 70 or greater.

 

[ZapperZ]

I know that Nobel prizes are somewhat meaningless given the amount of important work that is done over a year in any given area

Sorry, but this is a throw-away statement that itself is meaningless. Nobel prizes are anything but meaningless. Pick any discovery that has been awarded such prize, pick any laureate who has been awarded such prize and pick any institution representing those laureates, and ask them if it was "meaningless".

Zz.

 

[Orodruin]

Multimessenger discovery of a merging neutron star binary would be a candidate, but it is difficult to find at most three people to share it ... The author list includes 953 institutes ...

 

[berkeman]

Nobel prizes are somewhat meaningless given the amount of important work that is done over a year in any given area,

And the Nobel prizes are not awarded for the work done over the past year. Perhaps you should do a bit more reading about what goes into being chosen for a Nobel prize...

 

[Vanadium 50]

Pick any discovery that has been awarded such prize, pick any laureate who has been awarded such prize and pick any institution representing those laureates, and ask them if it was "meaningless".

Nils Gustaf Dalen, ""invention of automatic regulators for use in conjunction with gas accumulators for illuminating lighthouses and buoys".

 

[Ygggdrasil]

Here are a few who I think are deserving of the prize (focusing mostly on areas relevant to the biomedical sciences, which is my area of expertise):

Physiology and Medicine:
Cancer immunotherapy. James Allison for his contributions to checkpoint inhibitor therapy; and Steven Rosenberg and Zelig Eshhar for their contributions to CAR-T therapy. Cancer immunotherapy is one of the hottest areas in biomedical research, and it was largely started by the work of these three scientits in the 80s and 90s. The discoveries they made have been translated to the clinic and have led to FDA-approved anti-cancer therapies. (Of course, this may be one reason why the Nobel committee might wait a few years on awarding the prize to these individuals, as they might not want to be seen as endorsing commercial products).

Regulatory T-cells. Alexander Rudensky, Shimon Sakaguchi and Ethan Shevach for the discovery of regulatory T-cells. Along the same lines, these scientists discovered and characterized a new population of immune cells, regulatory T-cells (Treg), which act as a self-check to keep the immune system from destroying the body. The work is incredibly important for understanding the immune system, autoimmune diseases, and cancer immunotherapy.

Histone modifications. C. David Allis and Michael Grunstein for their work on elucidating the roles of histone proteins and their chemical modifications in the regulation of gene expression. This topic is an incredibly important, fundamental mechanism of gene regulation that has not yet been recognized by the committee (and is closest to my area of research). However, there are many people who have contributed to this field, so narrowing it down to three or fewer individuals may be difficult. These two, however, were just awarded the Lasker prize, so maybe the consensus is trending to these two as the ones most deserving or recognition for their work in the field.

Chemistry (again, mostly focusing on areas related to biology):
CRISPR. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier for elucidating the mechanism of DNA recognition and cleavage by the CRISPR-Cas9 system. For these two the question is not if, but when. CRISPR gene editing is an incredibly useful tool in the biomedical sciences, and it will likely have huge implications for society as it enables scientists to very easily modify the genes of many species, including humans. Some may say the prize is too soon (the key papers came out in 2012 and 2013), but other slam dunk prizes have been awarded prizes on similar timescales (Yamanaka's work published in 2006 on induced pleuripotent stem cells led to him wining the prize in 2012). While the committee may have been hesitant to award credit while patent littigation was ongoing, there was a ruling on the patent dispute earlier this year, which may remove these concerns. Feng Zhang, who built off of Doudna and Charpentier's work to figure out how to use the CRISPR-Cas9 system for gene editing, could also be recognized.

Optogenetics. Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Gero Miesenbock for the development of optogenetics. Optogenetics sounds like something from science fiction: designing genetically-encoded devices that allow scientists to precisely control cells by shining light on them. These scientists, however, made that fiction a reality by developing light-gated ion channels that allowed them to control the firing of neurons just by shining light on the neurons. Interestingly, Feng Zhang (mentioned above for his work on CRISPR) was Karl Deisseroth's graduate student so there may be a race between the two to see who gets a Nobel first.

 

[Orodruin]

Chemistry (again, mostly focusing on areas related to biology):
CRISPR. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier for elucidating the mechanism of DNA recognition and cleavage by the CRISPR-Cas9 system. For these two the question is not if, but when. CRISPR gene editing is an incredibly useful tool in the biomedical sciences, and it will likely have huge implications for society as it enables scientists to very easily modify the genes of many species, including humans. Some may say the prize is too soon (the key papers came out in 2012 and 2013), but other slam dunk prizes have been awarded prizes on similar timescales (Yamanaka's work published in 2006 on induced pleuripotent stem cells led to him wining the prize in 2012). While the committee may have been hesitant to award credit while patent littigation was ongoing, there was a ruling on the patent dispute earlier this year, which may remove these concerns. Feng Zhang, who built off of Doudna and Charpentier's work to figure out how to use the CRISPR-Cas9 system for gene editing, could also be recognized.

Just out of curiosity as a layman in both chemistry and medicine: Is it 100% clear to you that the CRISPR prize should be in chemistry rather than physiology/medicine?

 

[dipole]

It shouldn't. Yet only two women have ever been awarded the physics prize despite there being a large number of women who have clearly made contributions that are Nobel Prize worthy. The last time was Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963, that is 55 years ago and 60 years after Marie Curie was awarded her prize. That's my point.

Can you give specific examples of women who should have won, but didn't because of some gender based bias in the selection process? Should the Nobel prizes be 50/50 men and women, and if there aren't enough women should we just artificially lower the bar for women in order to boost their nobel prize count?

 

[Orodruin]

Can you give specific examples of women who should have won, but didn't because of some gender based bias in the selection process? Should the Nobel prizes be 50/50 men and women, and if there aren't enough women should we just artificially lower the bar for women in order to boost their nobel prize count?

Sorry, but this question shows profound ignorance of the history of the Nobel Prizes. There are many examples of women who arguably should have won a Nobel Prize, but did not. Of course, you can never prove that it was based on gender bias, but you asked for specific examples so let me just mention Lise Meitner who definitely should have shared the prize (in chemistry, but it might as well have been a physics prize) with Otto Hahn.

No, it should not be 50/50, but women in physics today are at least as prominent as men based on how big of a portion of the community they represent. To not have awarded a single prize to a woman for over 50 years is ridiculous.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

Just out of curiosity as a layman in both chemistry and medicine: Is it 100% clear to you that the CRISPR prize should be in chemistry rather than physiology/medicine?

Doudna and Charpentier's work was primarily biochemical, and similar work in molecular biology and biochemistry has been awarded the chemistry prize rather than the physiology or medicine prize. For example, in the last 10 years, we've seen Chemistry Prizes for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein (2008), studies of the structure and function of the ribosome (2009), studies of G-protein-coupled receptors (2012), and mechanistic studies of DNA repair (2015). Doudna did her postdoctoral work with Tom Cech, building off his work on catalytic RNAs, for which he won the 1989 Chemistry Prize. Doudna and Charpentier's work focused on figuring out how an important biological molecule works, and traditionally that sort of work has been awarded the Chemistry prize.

On the medicine side, there have been awards for biochemical work (e.g. the 2009 prize to Blackburn, Greider and Szostak for their work on telomerase), but here, the work was very relevant to human biology and human disease. (Note: Szostak was Doudna's PhD advisor, though Doudna did not work on telomerase in Szostak's lab). Part of the CRISPR story that is interesting to people is its role as a bacterial antiviral defense mechanisms, which would not really fit into physiology and medicine. Furthermore, although there are ongoing clinical trials using CRISPR, no therapies based on CRISPR have led to any breakthroughs in the treatment of disease (of course, the same could be said for RNAi, the subject of the 2006 prize, given that the first FDA-approved therapy using RNAi was just approved this year).

 

[ZapperZ]

Can you give specific examples of women who should have won, but didn't because of some gender based bias in the selection process? Should the Nobel prizes be 50/50 men and women, and if there aren't enough women should we just artificially lower the bar for women in order to boost their nobel prize count?

It is difficult to "prove" that these women were overlooked due to gender biased biases, because one needs clear proof of that. But in many of these cases, when we look at it now, they were head-scratchers on why they were overlooked while the colleagues that they were working with received the prize:

1. Rosalind Franklin. She essentially did ALL of the x-ray diffraction work that established the helical structure of the DNA.

2. Vera Rubin. Enough said.

3. Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Even astronomers were criticizing the Nobel Committee for overlooking what was really HER discovery, and gave the prize to her supervisor instead.

4. Chien-Shiung Wu. The "First Lady of Physics" managed to get her colleagues to win the Nobel Prize based on what she did.

5. Mildred Dresselhaus. Considering all the accolades given to her while she was alive, I am still shock that she has not been awarded the prize. Many people attributed her to the concept of the possible existence of graphene well before it was discovered.

etc...

Zz.

 

[PAllen]

Nils Gustaf Dalen, ""invention of automatic regulators for use in conjunction with gas accumulators for illuminating lighthouses and buoys".

Right, that’s an example of a low point in the Nobel committee where for partly political and religious reasons, as well as anti-theory bias, they did not want to award the prize to either Max Planck or Einstein (or earlier, Poincare), so they basically picked a place holder.

 

[PAllen]

I’ll second Lene Hau. I’ve been waiting for recognition of her work for well over a decade.

 

[ZeGato]

Sorry, but this is a throw-away statement that itself is meaningless. Nobel prizes are anything but meaningless. Pick any discovery that has been awarded such prize, pick any laureate who has been awarded such prize and pick any institution representing those laureates, and ask them if it was "meaningless".

Zz.

If there were researchers that also deserved to receive the prize and didn't (Einstein for his work on relativity comes to mind), it doesn't make sense to give any meaning to it. It's actually very anti-scientific to have a few people judging what has merit and what doesn't to receive their grand prize. It's good for hype, sure, but it doesn't have any meaning in Science.

 

[ZapperZ]

If there were researchers that also deserved to receive the prize and didn't (Einstein for his work on relativity comes to mind), it doesn't make sense to give any meaning to it. It's actually very anti-scientific to have a few people judging what has merit and what doesn't to receive their grand prize. It's good for hype, sure, but it doesn't have any meaning in Science.

But there is a difference between "science" and the "practice of science". The latter is still a human endeavor!

Everything about the practice of science requires someone, some group, or some institution to decide. A group of human beings decided if someone should be hired for a tenure-track position. Another had to decide on whether funding to be given to some research proposal. Then some steering committee will determine if a particular area should be given top priority, etc... etc. Every step in this human endeavor requires some people to judge and decide on something!

And you are directly and indirectly benefiting from these decisions, whether you realize it or not.

Zz.

 

[atyy]

Chemistry (again, mostly focusing on areas related to biology):
CRISPR. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier for elucidating the mechanism of DNA recognition and cleavage by the CRISPR-Cas9 system. For these two the question is not if, but when. CRISPR gene editing is an incredibly useful tool in the biomedical sciences, and it will likely have huge implications for society as it enables scientists to very easily modify the genes of many species, including humans. Some may say the prize is too soon (the key papers came out in 2012 and 2013), but other slam dunk prizes have been awarded prizes on similar timescales (Yamanaka's work published in 2006 on induced pleuripotent stem cells led to him wining the prize in 2012). While the committee may have been hesitant to award credit while patent littigation was ongoing, there was a ruling on the patent dispute earlier this year, which may remove these concerns. Feng Zhang, who built off of Doudna and Charpentier's work to figure out how to use the CRISPR-Cas9 system for gene editing, could also be recognized.

If Doudna and Charpentier get the Nobel Prize, the third person should be Virginijus Šikšnys, whose group discovered it first.

Does TALENS (an earlier technology than CRISPR) deserve a prize?

 

[atyy]

It is difficult to "prove" that these women were overlooked due to gender biased biases, because one needs clear proof of that. But in many of these cases, when we look at it now, they were head-scratchers on why they were overlooked while the colleagues that they were working with received the prize:

1. Rosalind Franklin. She essentially did ALL of the x-ray diffraction work that established the helical structure of the DNA.

2. Vera Rubin. Enough said.

3. Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Even astronomers were criticizing the Nobel Committee for overlooking what was really HER discovery, and gave the prize to her supervisor instead.

4. Chien-Shiung Wu. The "First Lady of Physics" managed to get her colleagues to win the Nobel Prize based on what she did.

5. Mildred Dresselhaus. Considering all the accolades given to her while she was alive, I am still shock that she has not been awarded the prize. Many people attributed her to the concept of the possible existence of graphene well before it was discovered.

etc...

Zz.

I think Franklin was technically not overlooked, as she had died. Would you include Lise Meitner among your etceteras?

 

[atyy]

Does the RHIC quark-gluon "perfect liquid" deserve a prize?

 

[Orodruin]

If there were researchers that also deserved to receive the prize and didn't (Einstein for his work on relativity comes to mind), it doesn't make sense to give any meaning to it

You need to check your history books. Einstein did win the Nobel prize. The reason was ”for his services to Theoretical Physics, in particular the photoelectric effect”. His services to theoretical physics certainly includes relativity, even if the committee did not want to put it in black on white.

Also, your line of argumentation is flawed. That there have been men who were overlooked in no way compensates for systematically overlooking women who many times did a larger part of the work. Bringing this up is whataboutism.

 

[Orodruin]

Doudna and Charpentier's work was primarily biochemical, ... just approved this year).

I will buy that the chemistry prize is more likely then, but would you consider it a stretch if they did get the prize in medicine? There have been previous prizes that could arguably have been in one of two categories, for example, the prize of Otto Hahn was already mentioned in this thread.

... Imagine the surprise of the Nobel Committee in Chemistry if they have decided to propose CRISPR to the academy and the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska announces it as the Medicine prize next Monday ...

 

[Orodruin]

Another person I would like to see win a Nobel Prize is Helen Quinn (with Peccei). She was the first woman to win an Oskar Klein medal, in 2008, which is also sponsored by the Royal Academy of Sciences. The Klein medal has a history of being awarded to many prominent physicists who have later gone on to win (Thorne, Higgs, Gross, Nambu, 't Hooft) a Nobel Prize (or already won it - Wilczek, Weinberg, Bethe). However, in the case of Quinn we would probably need to discover axions first ...

 

[atyy]

Another person I would like to see win a Nobel Prize is Helen Quinn (with Peccei). She was the first woman to win an Oskar Klein medal, in 2008, which is also sponsored by the Royal Academy of Sciences. The Klein medal has a history of being awarded to many prominent physicists who have later gone on to win (Thorne, Higgs, Gross, Nambu, 't Hooft) a Nobel Prize (or already won it - Wilczek, Weinberg, Bethe). However, in the case of Quinn we would probably need to discover axions first ...

Yeah, you need to discover the axion first so that PF can also have a Nobel Prize winner :)

 

[f95toli]

Nils Gustaf Dalen, ""invention of automatic regulators for use in conjunction with gas accumulators for illuminating lighthouses and buoys".

I think the question here is if the discovery was really "physics" as such; although I guess that could be said for the integrated circuit as well.
Dahlen's system was used in countless lighthouses around the world for close of half a century and made automatic lighthouses much more practical. Hence, giving him the price was probably very much in the spirit of what Nobel.had in mind.

Also, the sun valve is a very, very clever invention.

 

[Orodruin]

I think the question here is if the discovery was really "physics" as such; although I guess that could be said for the integrated circuit as well.
Dahlen's system was used in countless lighthouses around the world for close of half a century and made automatic lighthouses much more practical. Hence, giving him the price was probably very much in the spirit of what Nobel.had in mind.

Also, the sun valve is a very, very clever invention.

This is a good point. The discussion might benefit from the formulation of Alfred Nobel's will:

one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics

The main question is probably what Nobel intended by an "invention within the field of physics". Just from the wording, one could ask the question whether a theoretical framework is an "invention" (e.g., would this include Noether's theorem?) or if invention is intended to be of a more practical nature. Given what I know of Alfred Nobel, I would tend to favour the latter interpretation, which is also what the Nobel Committee has historically done, but of course there is no way of actually asking him.

 

[pinball1970]

Nils Gustaf Dalen, ""invention of automatic regulators for use in conjunction with gas accumulators for illuminating lighthouses and buoys".

I want to stand up for the small guy a little on this after a quick google, Dalen lost his sight in an accident during an experiment and could not attend the Nobel ceremony.
Commitment for his cause if nothing else and a high price to pay.


With the whole women thing, one has to remember women hardly had any rights at all until fairly recently so you would expect society to reflect that.
Women did not vote in the UK till 1918 by which time Marie Curie had already won two Nobel prizes which is a nod in the direction of science out running societal prejudice.
Its also worth looking at the attitude to education/University in terms of when women were allowed to attend and study for a degree, hardly surprising not as women could get a look in.
Reading a little history Jocelyn Bell probably should have been in with a shout.

 

[pinball1970]

Sorry, but this question shows profound ignorance of the history of the Nobel Prizes. There are many examples of women who arguably should have won a Nobel Prize, but did not. Of course, you can never prove that it was based on gender bias, but you asked for specific examples so let me just mention Lise Meitner who definitely should have shared the prize (in chemistry, but it might as well have been a physics prize) with Otto Hahn.

No, it should not be 50/50, but women in physics today are at least as prominent as men based on how big of a portion of the community they represent. To not have awarded a single prize to a woman for over 50 years is ridiculous.

It is difficult to "prove" that these women were overlooked due to gender biased biases, because one needs clear proof of that. But in many of these cases, when we look at it now, they were head-scratchers on why they were overlooked while the colleagues that they were working with received the prize:

1. Rosalind Franklin. She essentially did ALL of the x-ray diffraction work that established the helical structure of the DNA.

2. Vera Rubin. Enough said.

3. Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Even astronomers were criticizing the Nobel Committee for overlooking what was really HER discovery, and gave the prize to her supervisor instead.

4. Chien-Shiung Wu. The "First Lady of Physics" managed to get her colleagues to win the Nobel Prize based on what she did.

5. Mildred Dresselhaus. Considering all the accolades given to her while she was alive, I am still shock that she has not been awarded the prize. Many people attributed her to the concept of the possible existence of graphene well before it was discovered.

etc...

Zz.

oops you already pointed this out

 

[Demystifier]

Anybody who dares to take a stab at speculating who will be the happy receiver of a phone call from the Royal Academy of Sciences on October 2?

My try: Zeilinger (probably sharing with someone else) for experiments on quantum foundations, especially for simultaneous closing of fair sampling and locality loopholes in tests of Bell inequalities.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.250401

 

[ZeGato]

You need to check your history books. Einstein did win the Nobel prize. The reason was ”for his services to Theoretical Physics, in particular the photoelectric effect”. His services to theoretical physics certainly includes relativity, even if the committee did not want to put it in black on white.

Also, your line of argumentation is flawed. That there have been men who were overlooked in no way compensates for systematically overlooking women who many times did a larger part of the work. Bringing this up is whataboutism.

I didn't bring up that fact to argue against any of that. You're the one bringing up the fact that women's work was overlooked in the past, and because of that "it's about time the prize goes to a woman", as if two wrongs make a right (wrong in the sense of weighing in the scientist's gender to make a decision).

 

[StatGuy2000]

Some data points regarding the Nobel Prize:

Between 1901 and 2017, the Nobel Prize have been awarded to women 49 times, and thus 48 women were awarded the Nobel Prize in total out of 892 individuals, meaning 5.4% of all Nobel Prizes awarded to individuals were to women. (Please note that Marie Curie had been awarded the prize twice, once in 1903 in physics, the other in 1911 in chemistry).

If you look at the distribution of the Nobel Prizes awarded to women:

1. 2 were for physics, 4 were for chemistry, and 12 were for physiology and medicine. Therefore, out of the 48 women awarded the prize, 17 women (35.4%) were awarded for STEM fields recognized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Karolinska Institute (who present the prizes for the STEM categories).

2. One woman (2.1%), Elinor Ostrom, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009.

3. The remaining 30 women (62.5%) were thus awarded for Peace or for Literature

It's also worth noting that out of all of the women awarded the Nobel Prize, 19 (39.6%) were awarded between the years of 2001-2017.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/nobel-prize-awarded-women-3/

 

[Orodruin]

I didn't bring up that fact to argue against any of that. You're the one bringing up the fact that women's work was overlooked in the past, and because of that "it's about time the prize goes to a woman", as if two wrongs make a right (wrong in the sense of weighing in the scientist's gender to make a decision).

Then you are making a straw-man argument. I am not arguing that at all. I am just saying that it is about time. The accomplishments of Lene Hau (who I was discussing) stand on their own.

 

[Orodruin]

were awarded for STEM fields recognized by the Nobel Academy

Just a formality: There is no such thing as the "Nobel Academy". The Nobel Assembly is the body under Karolinska Institutet that selects the laureate(s) in Physiology or Medicine. The Physics and Chemistry laureates are selected by the Royal Academy of Sciences and is usually based on the suggestions by its Nobel Committees in the respective subjects.

 

[TeethWhitener]

My try: Zeilinger (probably sharing with someone else) for experiments on quantum foundations, especially for simultaneous closing of fair sampling and locality loopholes in tests of Bell inequalities.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.250401

My feeling is that Zeilinger will almost certainly win at some point. Whether this is the year is an open question.

CRISPR. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier for elucidating the mechanism of DNA recognition and cleavage by the CRISPR-Cas9 system.

Yeah, Doudna and Charpentier will definitely win, and soon. Although I'm kind of shocked that the Human Genome Project still hasn't gotten a shoutout after ~15 years (Craig Venter and Francis Collins being the obvious choices). Maybe Chemistry will go to CRISPR and Medicine will go to HGP.