Nobel Prizes honor basic science, which allows advances such as covid vaccines

Basic research is the origin of all Scientific advanceslike the one that allowed the development of vaccines RNA messenger against covid-19 or quantum dots, present on many television screens, discoveries that this year receive the Nobel Prize.

The awards are presented on the 10th, coinciding with the date of Alfred Nobel’s death, but from tomorrow the winners begin to arrive in Stockholm to participate in a week of celebrations.

On this occasion there are seven men and four women recognized, among them the new Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Iranian Narges Mohammadi, whose award will be presented in Oslo, as established in his will by the founder of these awards.

The Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó and the American immunologist Drew Weissman have received many awards in recent years and now it is the turn of the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

However, the road was not easy at all, with financing difficulties and little attention from the scientific world to their advances for years, although they persevered in their research, which served as the basis for developing messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines in record time against the disease. covid-19.

Vaccines that have saved millions of lives, compared to “one of the great threats to human health in modern times”highlighted the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm when the prize was decided.

Messenger RNA is a mechanism that teaches the body’s cells to fight diseases, and the technique developed by the winners has applications in vaccines against viruses, such as the flu, in addition to the research already underway against cancer and other diseases.

Basic science is also what the Frenchman Moungi Bawendi, the American Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov, born in the former Soviet Union, do, deserving of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots.

These are tiny nanocrystals, approximately one million times smaller than the head of a pin, whose properties include emitting light of different colors depending on size.

Quantum dots already illuminate computer monitors and television screens based on QLED technology and are used by biochemists and doctors to map biological tissues.

The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to the French Anne L’Huillier and Pierre Agostini and the Hungarian Ferenc Krausz, for their work to generate light pulses with lasers lasting attoseconds and thus investigate the dynamics of electrons within atoms.

They have thus opened a new field of research that can promote applications in areas such as electronics, disease diagnosis and the search for clean energy sources.

The Nobel Peace Prize recognizes Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and for promoting human rights and freedom for all.

Imprisoned in Evin Prison, Mohammadi is serving a 10-year sentence and has been in and out of Iranian prisons for years. Her activism has cost her 13 arrests, five sentences of 31 years in prison in total and 154 lashes.

The Norwegian novelist and playwright Jon Fosse is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “for his innovative plays and prose that give voice to the ineffable”something that cannot be explained in words.

Considered one of the main playwrights of recent decades, Fosse is intimate, reflective and minimalist, with innovative and difficult to catalog works that have almost made him invent new literary forms.

A declared admirer of Federico García Lorca, his work has been translated into forty languages ​​and his plays have been performed in around a thousand productions around the world, with titles such as ‘Namnet’ (The Name, 1995) or ‘Dødsvariasjonar’ (Variations of Death, 2002).

One of his most recognized works in prose is ‘Trilogy’ (2014), a saga of love and violence with biblical references and predecessor of his magnum opus ‘Septología’ (2021), written in the form of a monologue in which an elderly artist talks to himself.

The American Claudia Goldin is the Nobel Prize winner in Economics, the third woman to win this prize and the first to do so alone, for having advanced our understanding of women’s performance in the labor market.

Goldin produced the first comprehensive report on women’s income and participation in the labor market over the centuries.